Guyana Amerindian communities fear Venezuela’s move to annex oil-rich region

by Aimee Gabay 

MONGABAY

on 17 January 2024

In Decemer, Venezuela’s president announced a series of measures and legislation to formalize the country’s possession of the oil-rich Essequibo region in Guyana, which he argues was stolen from Venezuela when the border was drawn more than a century ago.
Venezuela has instructed the state’s oil and gas agencies to immediately grant operating licenses to explore and exploit oil, gas and mines in the Essequibo region, giving companies already operating in the area three months to leave.
Amerindian communities in Guyana have raised concerns that Venezuela’s takeover may threaten decades-long battles for recognition of their customary lands and, in the process, endanger the region’s rich biodiversity.

In December, the Venezuelan government launched a series of measures and legislation to cement the country’s annexation of Guyana’s oil and mineral-rich Essequibo region. This is prompting fears among dozens of Amerindian communities that the conflict may threaten ongoing efforts to legally recognize their collective territorial lands or undermine their land titles in this Amazon region.

According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, 90% of Venezuelans voted in favor of ownership over Essequibo in a Dec. 3 referendum called by the president in which fewer than half of voters cast their ballots — a result widely criticized by international analysts. The dispute between the two countries over the territory, an area the size of Greece, dates back to 1899 when an international tribunal of arbitration drew the border between them. However, the Venezuelan government states that the dispute began much earlier.

Amerindian toshaos, or village chiefs, in Essequibo fear that a drastic shift in control of natural resources in this large belt of tropical forests may threaten their traditional lands. All five chiefs told Mongabay they are also worried about their safety in the case of an invasion, a concern that extends within the villages. The Amerindian Peoples Association (APA), a Guyanese NGO, told Mongabay that some families have already moved away from their villages in search of security.

But Faye Stewart, a representative of the APA, said that while the threat is real, immediately fleeing lands is mostly due to a lack of access to credible information from the authorities that “stirred up a lot of unnecessary reactions.”

Essequibo River flanked by tropical forests. Amerindian toshaos, or village chiefs, in Essequibo fear that a drastic shift in control of natural resources in this large belt of tropical forests may threaten their traditional lands. Image by Dan Lundberg via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Initially, there was an information blackout from the government while misleading information was spread on TikTok, Steward said, contributing to tension and fear.

On Dec. 29, a British warship arrived in Guyana to conduct training exercises with Guyana’s military. In response, the Venezuelan Armed Forces sent more than 5,600 troops to join a “defensive” operation near the Guyana border. Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since expressed concerns about the situation and urged the two South American countries to remain committed to the Argyle Declaration, a bilateral agreement signed in mid-December, when both parties promised to navigate the dispute through nonviolent means.

“I’ve been told that these aggressions have happened even worse in the past, and it’s usually something that we see happening a lot around election time,” said Stewart, mulling over the possibility of an invasion. “But I know it’s different now because of Guyana’s newfound [oil] wealth.”

Guyana map with the conflict areas marked out. Image by SurinameCentral via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Amerindian land rights under question

Romario Hastings, a resident of Kako village in the Upper Mazaruni district, is among more than 85,000 Amerindian peoples living in Guyana today. Nine different groups, which include the Akawaio, Arawak, Arecuna, Carib, Macushi, Patamona, Wai-Wai, Wapichan and Warao peoples, are settled across the country’s 10 regions.

In Guyana, more than 100 Amerindian communities hold absolute, unconditional and collective titles to the land they occupy and use. “If you look up Amerindian land titles in Guyana, you will find that the majority of them are within the Essequibo region,” Romario Hastings told Mongabay. “If [President Nicolás] Maduro has his way, it will jeopardize the steps we have already taken as Indigenous peoples, which have been years and years of struggle.”

According to Hastings, the fact that Maduro does not recognize international law and the international process in the dispute leaves him with huge doubts the president would recognize their Indigenous ancestral lands.

Officials from Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not comment on the land rights and future of Amerindian communities living in Essequibo.

According to Graham Atkinson, a representative of the APA, land titling in Guyana has been slow. In 2013, the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs received $10.7 million from the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund to facilitate and fast-track the Amerindian land titling process. This project, which is known as the Amerindian Land Titling Project, was scheduled to close in 2016 but was extended from 2016 to 2018 and again from 2019 to 2024, as only 20 demarcations out of 68 cases had been completed.

“Guyana has had this long-standing issue of not fully recognizing Indigenous people’s territorial lands,” Atkinson told Mongabay. “It’s still an ongoing battle, and so this whole issue of another country annexing part of the country of Guyana will be very detrimental.”

Some communities are locked in legal battles with the Guyanese government and don’t want their case switching hands.

In 1998, the Kako and five other Amerindian villages from the Upper Mazaruni district took the Guyanese government to court because they were dissatisfied with the land title granted to them in 1991. After a 24-year legal battle, in 2022, the judge ruled that the villagers do not have “exclusive right” to the lands they requested, despite evidence that their people had lived there for more than 2,000 years, because non-Amerindians were also settled there. The Upper Mazaruni District Council (UMDC) has since filed an appeal.

“If Maduro should have his way, that will affect our case, which would have serious implications on our lives as a people,” said Hastings, another toshao of Kako Village and Chairman of the UMDC.

A small Amerindian village in central Guyana.

 Image by David Stanley via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Amerindians in a boat on Kamuni river. 

Image by Carsten ten Brink via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Oil and riches

For decades, more than 50% of the Guyanese population lived below the poverty line, but in 2015, when U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil discovered an estimated 11 billion barrels of crude oil deposits just off the coast of Essequibo, its economic landscape underwent a drastic transformation. Commercial drilling started in 2019 and the Guyanese economy quickly tripled in size, from one of the lowest GDPs per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean in the early ‘90s to fourth-highest, behind the U.S., Canada and the Bahamas. According to the International Monetary Fund, it is the fastest growth rate anywhere in the world. The country also holds large quantities of gold, diamond and bauxite.

Meanwhile, more than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015 as a result of economic and political turmoil. The country is experiencing a humanitarian crisis that has condemned three-quarters of the population to extreme poverty. In 2020, starved of adequate investment and maintenance, oil exports dropped to a 75-year low and, according to shipping and tracking data, despite the easing of U.S. sanctions, exports did not rise as much as expected last year.

“The Essequibo region is of interest due to being rich in natural resources, including fertile land and very lucrative oil reserves offshore,” Matheus de Freitas Cecílio, a researcher from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, told Mongabay. “The most recent discoveries of oil reserves put Guyana as one of the countries with the most promising economic growth trajectory in the next few years.”

Maduro has laid out his plans to explore oil, gas and minerals in Essequibo, where dozens of Amerindian villages sit. He instructed the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and decentralized state-owned minerals company Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) to immediately “grant operating licenses for the exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and mines.”

He also proposed a special law to prohibit oil concessions granted by Guyana in Essequibo to be delimited. “We are giving three months to the companies that are exploiting resources there without Venezuelan permission to comply with the law,” Maduro said.

A gold mine in the middle of the forest in Guyana, which leads to damages to Amerindian community resources, increase human conflict and pollution of rivers with sediment and mercury. 

Image by Allan Hopkins via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

According to a report published by the environmental organization Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela, the PDVSA’s aging infrastructure and the country’s weak environmental regulations was responsible for the country’s rise in oil spills and gas leaks in 2022. The spills caused pollution that threatened marine ecosystems and led to the deaths of seabirds, fish and other marine life. As the national economy collapses, the state-owned company has cut down on maintenance and supervision, particularly in Lake Maracaibo, where many pipelines and facilities are more than 50 years old.

Because the majority of these oil blocks are found in Guyana’s coastal waters and do not directly impact Amerindian lands mainly located inland, oil drilling has not yet posed big issues for land rights in Essequibo.

However, Maduro’s interest in mineral exploration and exploitation inland has a possibility of directly impacting Amerindian lands.

Guyana’s own mining interests and activities in the region have already been an issue for these communities in the past, although many Amerindians are also involved in small-scale mining operations. Despite policies and contracts to secure consultation, communities continue to run into land disputes with the government and companies that prospect on their titled lands. When mining has occurred in or nearby communities, some have suffered from river and drinking-water contamination by mercury used in the mining process and a decline of fishing and game.

“The [Guyanese] government’s plan is to exploit resources to develop the country … but the government proposes plans and implements them without our full participation, and that has been a problem,” said Mario Hastings, the toshao of Kako village. “They continue to grant concessions, forest concessions and mining concessions, when we do not agree.”

Amerindian communities in Essequibo say a new wave of oil and gas concessions without recognition of their Guyanese land titles will have a huge impact on the environment. Lennox Percy, toshao of Paruima village in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni region, told Mongabay that his community has no interest in mining. “Our way of living is sustainable,” he said. “We don’t want that kind of industry in this area.”

Both PDVSA and CVG did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did officials from Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Banner image: An Amerindian guide paddles his canoe up the Burro Burro River, Guyana. Image by David Stanley via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Study: Burning wood pellets for energy endangers local communities’ health

by Justin Catanoso

on 18 January 2024

A new peer-reviewed study quantifies broadly for the first time the air pollution and public health impacts across the United States from both manufacturing wood pellets and burning them for energy.

The study, said to be far more extensive than any research by the US Environmental Protection Agency, finds that U.S. biomass-burning facilities emit on average 2.8 times the amount of pollution of power plants that burn coal, oil or natural gas.

Wood pellet manufacturers maintain that the harvest of forest wood for the purpose of making wood pellets to burn for energy remains a climate-friendly solution. But a host of studies undermine those claims.

The Southern Environmental Law Center says the study provides new and rigorous science that could become a useful tool in arguing against the expansion of the wood pellet industry in the United States.

Forest and air quality advocates in the United States have long argued that manufacturing wood pellets from leveled forests and burning the compressed wood for energy is neither a green nor clean climate solution as biomass industry advocates have long claimed.

Now, a recent study in Renewable Energy purports to put unique, broad and scientific rigor behind arguments against the ongoing expansion of biomass production for energy. The researchers find, for the first time, that U.S. biomass facilities emit on average 2.8 times the amount of pollution as that emitted by traditional fossil fuel facilities like oil and coal. A wide range of hazardous air pollutants are emitted from burning wood pellets for energy, including particulate matter and dioxins, that are harmful to human health, the study finds.

The study finds that thousands of tons of toxic, health-harming air pollutants, from nitrogen oxide to volatile organic compounds, are also emitted in the pellet-making process, especially in the Southeast where most pellet plants are located. Researchers report that 55 hazardous pollutants collectively exceeded by two times the allowable pollution permitted by state air-quality agencies. Higher concentrations of this pollution, the study confirms, adversely impact social justice communities, or mainly poor, minority communities where the pellet plants are located.

“Fourteen million people in the United States live within a few miles of bioenergy facilities and breathe potentially harmful toxins and pollutants,” says Edie Juno, co-author of the study and a forestry specialist with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C. “As the bioenergy market continues to grow globally, it is critical that we understand the impacts and costs of utilizing biomass for energy.”

Juno confirms that burning these pellets overseas — in the EU, U.K., Japan and South Korea — also leads to hazardous pollution. In the U.S., where burning forest biomass makes up only 1.3% of overall U.S. energy generation, it contributes about 3-17% of all energy pollutant emissions, according to the new study.

“If … the U.S. increases the share of bioenergy as it reduces the share of fossil fuel energy in its mix,” the study notes, “emissions from bioenergy could present greater concerns to public health.”

Saravanan Arunachalam, co-author and deputy direct of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, adds, “For too long, the impacts of bioenergy and wood-pellet production on air pollution have been under-researched.”

He tells Mongabay that the study, which in essence compares state-granted pollution permits with actual emissions, is significantly more comprehensive than anything produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“The EPA inventory [to track similar bioenergy impacts] included 38 facilities,” Arunachalam says, “but as we found from various sources, 153 plants were issued permits across the country for manufacturing and burning.”

A wood pellet pile at a pellet manufacturing mill. Forest and air quality advocates in the United States have long argued that manufacturing wood pellets from leveled forests and burning the compressed wood for energy is neither a green nor clean climate solution as biomass industry advocates have long claimed. 

Image by Wild Center via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

A growing U.S. presence

Currently, the European Union relies far more heavily on forest biomass for energy production. There, it makes up 60% of the EU’s so-called renewable energy mix.

“I don’t think we’re in a giant energy transition in the U.S. from fossil fuels to biomass,” Juno says. “But new bioenergy plants are being proposed in California and other regions of the country. Policymakers need to know this is counterproductive to our clean energy and carbon reduction goals, and also to our goals around human health and well-being.”

Juno’s concerns over an expanding US biomass industry are already beginning to play out. The U.S. Forest Service announced in June 2023 around $10 million in grants in support of a range of startup biomass-burning projects in states such as Alaska, California, Washington, Colorado, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Environmental and social justice groups have also sought to bring attention to lobbying efforts to the U.S. Congress by two of the world’s largest wood pellet manufacturers, Enviva and Drax.

Both companies, which collectively operate more than a dozen facilities in the U.S. Southeast, continue to seek the kinds of U.S. taxpayer subsidies that have fueled their growth overseas. Both the EU and the United Kingdom have spent billions in public money to convert scores of coal-burning energy plants to burn wood pellets instead.

Most wood pellet manufacturing is in the Southeastern United States, from Virginia to the Deep South. Two companies – Maryland-based Enviva and United Kingdom-based Drax – operate more than a dozen pellet-making plants in the region, contributing to widespread deforestation and air pollution.

 Graphic courtesy of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Industry claims climate benefits

Representatives with the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association did not respond to requests for comment. But its website is filled with content that describes “a growing body of scientific literature [that] confirms the US biomass industry is achieving carbon-neutrality, a key requirement for reducing emissions and mitigating climate change.”

The association argues that the cut forests regrow over time, sequestering the emitted carbon. This is why the industry argues — and many government policies agree — that burning wood pellets is carbon neutral and thus a better climate-mitigating choice than burning coal.

But an oft-cited 2018 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that carbon neutrality after clear-cutting takes 44-104 years, assuming the forest is allowed to regrow and is not cut again in the meantime. Meaning, once cut, these regrowing forests should be left alone until the 2120s. This goes against the United Nations assertion that we must reach global carbon neutrality within about 25 years to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

In addition, Enviva and Drax contribute to the clear-cutting of hundreds of acres per month of native forests across the Southeast to produce roughly 10 million metric tons of wood pellets annually for export overseas to the U.K., EU and Asia.

“Assuming biofuels are carbon neutral may worsen irreversible impacts of climate change before benefits accrue,” MIT researcher John Sterman wrote as part of the 2018 study.

In the new study, UNC researcher Arunachalam says his team does not address the issue of carbon neutrality but says, “Making and burning wood pellets is certainly not health neutral.”

This wood pellet manufacturing plant in Ahoskie, North Carolina was Enviva’s first in the state, opening in 2011. Wood feedstock – pine and hardwood – arrives at the plant already chipped from native forests within a 50-mile radius of the plant. The chips are dried and then pressed into pellets. According to a new study in Renewable Energy, wood pellet production emits more than 55 hazardous air pollutants, along with tons of volatile organic compounds and particulate matter. Many of the pollutants can be harmful to human health. 

Image by Justin Catanoso.

A new tool for air quality advocates

In the new study, researchers inventory the states with the highest concentrations of toxic pollutants in the air due to wood pellet production and burning. Those U.S. states are in the Southeast: Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Virginia — where Enviva and Drax plants are located.

In 2021, Mississippi fined a Drax-owned plant in the state $2.5 million for violating hazardous emissions limits. North Carolina also cited one of its Enviva plants at least five times for air pollution violations, though the fines were minimal.

Patrick Anderson, a staff attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Atlanta in its clean air program, calls the study a new, credible and comprehensive tool in SELC’s mission to oppose the expansion of wood pellet making and burning in the United States.

“I spend a lot of time with this kind of data,” Anderson tells Mongabay. “If you used the EPA National Emissions Inventory and you wanted to know how much pollution all the wood power plants in the country emitted, you just couldn’t do it. You could get close, but the data set would be incomplete and very limited with plenty of blind spots.”

Anderson says he wasn’t surprised by the study’s bleak findings, but it will be a useful and rigorous “tool” in arguing against incentivizing the expansion of the biomass industry in the U.S.

In 2023, U.S. wood pellet exports were up 6% through September over 2022’s record shipments, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Despite known environmental drawbacks, demand for wood pellets remains high across the EU, U.K., as well as Japan and South Korea.

Whether Enviva, the world’s largest maker of wood pellets, can continue to meet that demand remains in question. The company lost hundreds of millions of dollars last year due to machinery failures at many of its plants, high maintenance costs and rising wood costs. Management warned investors in November that it may not be able “to continue as a going concern.”

Anderson says if Enviva fails, the new study could become useful for the SELC or other forest advocates in arguing against any new pellet manufacturer receiving federal, state or local subsidies to take over and repair Enviva’s plants to produce the tons of pellets Enviva has been making for years..

Banner image: A wide range of hazardous air pollutants are emitted from burning wood pellets for energy, including particulate matter and dioxins, that are harmful to human health. Image by Oregon Department of Forestry via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Citations:

Tran, Huy; Juno, Edie; Arunachalam, Sarav (2023) Emissions of wood pelletization and bioenergy use in the United States. Renewable Energy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2023.119536

Sterman, John, et al (2018) Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions? Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy. Environmental Research Letters. 13 015007 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512

How much carbon does ocean trawling put into the atmosphere?

by Elizabeth Claire Alberts 

MONGABAY

19 January 2024

New research suggests that bottom trawling stirs up large amounts of carbon from the seabed and releases 55-60% of this carbon into the atmosphere within nine years.

This amount of carbon is nearly double the annual emissions from the combustion of fuel by the entire global fishing fleet of about 4 million vessels, the study suggests.

The authors say that the remaining 40-45% of the carbon would remain dissolved in the water, contributing to ocean acidification.

However, this study has drawn criticism for potentially overestimating the amount of seabed carbon that trawling releases.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s wild-caught seafood is scooped up by bottom trawlers, fishing vessels that drag heavy nets over the seafloor. These boats fish the world over and support numerous global seafood supply chains. Yet critics have dogged them as environmentally unfriendly. Conservation experts say they can damage sensitive marine ecosystems, like deep-sea coral, and scoop up mobs of non-target species as bycatch. Research also suggests trawlers can disturb carbon deposits in seabed sediment, undermining the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink.

But how much carbon does trawling actually release? And what happens to that carbon? These questions have generated significant debate.

A new study published Jan. 18 in Frontiers in Marine Science attempts to answer at least one unresolved question: How much carbon does trawling put into the atmosphere?

The research draws on a 2021 study published in Nature that calculated that trawling stirs up and releases about 1 gigaton, or 1 billion metric tons, of carbon each year — nearly equivalent to the annual emissions from the global aviation industry. The new study takes things one step further. It recalculates the amount of released carbon by adjusting the models from the Nature paper. Then it quantifies how much of this carbon escapes from the sea into the atmosphere, adding to the mass amounts of human-produced carbon dioxide already there that are causing global warming.

A shrimp trawler pursued by sea lions and sea gulls in Mexico.

 Image ©️ Greenpeace / Alex Hofford.

It found that 55-60% of this carbon will make it into the atmosphere in about nine years. This is nearly double the annual emissions from the combustion of fuel by the entire global fishing fleet of about 4 million vessels, according to the authors. The remaining 40-45% of the stirred-up carbon would remain dissolved in seawater, the study says. There it would contribute to ocean acidification, which notably compromises the ability of many organisms at the bottom of the food chain to form shells and is already at record levels around the world.

“Under current climate policy, things like carbon markets … really work off of atmospheric emissions,” lead author Trisha Atwood, an aquatic ecologist at Utah State University and National Geographic’s Pristine Seas program, told Mongabay. “If that CO2 had just remained in the water, then from a policy standpoint, people didn’t really care … and we couldn’t answer whether or not they should care because we didn’t have that number.”

But that all changed when scientists from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies got in touch with Atwood, who co-authored the Nature study, and her colleagues.

“They said, ‘We have models to do this,’” Atwood said. “And these models have been used for the IPCC reports; they’ve been used for the global carbon budget. What these models basically do is develop an understanding of how the ocean and the atmosphere interact together, and how they and where they exchange carbon or CO2.”

The researchers found that carbon emissions from bottom trawling, which can produce large sediment plumes that are visible from space, were particularly high for some parts of the world, including the East China, Baltic, North, and Greenland seas. They also suggest that trawling activity, and the ensuing release of carbon, may be elevated in Southeast Asia, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, parts of Europe, and the Gulf of Mexico, although there are insufficient data on trawling activity for these parts of the world to be sure.

This lack of data could be because many vessels don’t use satellite tracking systems, despite many national and international laws requiring them to do so. According to another study published earlier this month, 75% of industrial fishing activity isn’t tracked on public systems. This suggests the Frontiers paper’s calculations may be on the conservative side.

A crewmember working the net on a trawl. 

Image by Jennifer Gilden/Pacific Fishery Management Council via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

“We definitely think that we are underestimating the expanse of global bottom trawling because our way of tracking bottom trawlers for this paper uses a very particular type of signal that not every boat has — it’s called an AIS signal,” Atwood said.

William Austin, chair of the United Nations Ocean Decade Programme for Blue Carbon, who wasn’t involved in this research, said the study highlights the “need to better understand and constrain the potentially significant atmospheric emissions” from bottom trawling.

“There is no doubt that both ecosystems and sediment carbon stores are vulnerable to these pressures,” Austin, who has studied carbon storage in marine sediment and published research on its disturbance by trawlers in the U.K., told Mongabay in an emailed statement, “and the good news is that we can manage these activities to deliver better outcomes for sustainable fisheries, biodiversity gain, and probably our climate system.”

However, both the 2021 Nature study and the new Frontiers study have drawn some criticism. After the publication of the Nature study, a team of scientists published several rebuttals to it in the same journal, including one suggesting that trawling produced significantly less carbon than the Nature study said it did.

Atwood said she and her colleagues stand by their conclusions. “Some of their assumptions are fundamentally incorrect about what we did,” she said about the rebuttal. “And that they provide no quantitative support for what they are saying.”

However, Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, who co-authored one of the rebuttals, said he believes the new study is flawed based on its reliance on the previous Nature study. He said the Nature study wrongly assumed that carbon on the seafloor exists in a homogeneous layer, when in fact there’s a deeply buried layer of carbon as well as a top layer of carbon that’s “naturally stirred up” by organisms like clams and polychaete worms. Moreover, Hilborn said, trawling only tends to impact that top layer.

“It’s certainly misleading,” Hilborn told Mongabay. “Their overall estimate of how much carbon gets suspended has the same problem the earlier Sala [Nature] paper did.

“There is still a lot of uncertainty about how much sediment disturbance trawling generates,” he added. “It’s not nailed down.”

Banner image caption: A trawler off the coast of the Netherlands. Image by Paul van de Velde via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay’s Ocean Desk. Follow her on Mastodon, @ECAlberts@journa.host, Blue Sky, @elizabethalberts.bsky.social, and Twitter @ECAlberts.

Citations:

Atwood, T. B., Romanou, A., DeVries, T., Lerner, P. E., Mayorga, J. S., Bradley, D., … Sala, E. (2024). Atmospheric CO2 emissions and ocean acidification from bottom-trawling. Frontiers in Marine Science, 10. doi:10.3389/fmars.2023.1125137

Black, K. E., Smeaton, C., Turrell, W. R., & Austin, W. E. (2022). Assessing the potential vulnerability of sedimentary carbon stores to bottom trawling disturbance within the UK EEZ. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9. doi:10.3389/fmars.2022.892892

Collins, J., Kleisner, K., Fujita, R., & Boenish, R. (2023). Atmospheric carbon emissions from benthic trawling depend on water depth and ocean circulation. EarthArXiv Preprint. doi:10.31223/x5xd2p

Hilborn, R., & Kaiser, M. J. (2022). A path forward for analysing the impacts of marine protected areas. Nature, 607(7917), E1-E2. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04775-1

Hiddink, J. G., Van de Velde, S. J., McConnaughey, R. A., De Borger, E., Tiano, J., Kaiser, M. J., … Sciberras, M. (2023). Quantifying the carbon benefits of ending bottom trawling. Nature, 617(7960), E1-E2. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06014-7

Paolo, F., Kroodsma, D., Raynor, J., Hochberg, T., Davis, P., Cleary, J., … Halpin, P. (2024). Satellite mapping reveals extensive industrial activity at sea. Nature, 625(7993), 85-91. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06825-8

Sala, E., Mayorga, J., Bradley, D., Cabral, R. B., Atwood, T. B., Auber, A., … Lubchenco, J. (2021). Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate. Nature, 592, 397-402. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03371-z

We need a better understanding of how crops fare under solar panels, study shows

by Ruth Kamnitzer 

MONGABAY

23 January 2024

In agrivoltaics, farmers grow crops beneath or between solar panels.

Proponents say the technology can help achieve clean energy goals while maintaining food production, but experts caution that careful analysis and guidelines are needed if we’re not to compromise agricultural production.

A new synthesis of previously published studies finds that overall crop yields decline as the amount of land covered by solar panels increases.

This ground cover ratio is a convenient, easily measured and reproducible metric that can be used to predict crop yields and better evaluate agrivoltaic systems.

The dream of agrivoltaics is to generate your electricity and eat your edamame too. But a recent study in Agroforestry Systems shows that agrivoltaics — growing food beneath solar panels — is not so simple. Research published in September finds that overall crop yields decrease when paired with solar panels and offers a way to standardize agrivoltaic regulations so we don’t give too much valuable agricultural land over to power generation.

“Electricians want more panels, farmers want less,” study author Christian Dupraz, senior scientist in agroforestry and agrivoltaism at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), writes in an email to Mongabay. “[The analysis] reveals that maintaining a ‘normal’ agricultural yield under PV [photovoltaic] panels is not possible, even with low GCRs [ground coverage ratios].”

However, planting crops under partial shade isn’t a new idea — and can work under some conditions. Traditionally, agricultural and agroforestry systems used multilayered plantings by, for example, cultivating shade-tolerant crops such as coffee under bananas. Now, with growing demand for clean energy but a paucity of empty land, researchers are exploring how to grow crops under raised solar panels (photovoltaics) instead of trees.

The idea is that the solar panels are arranged so crops still get enough light and may also benefit from protection from extreme weather such as heavy rain, frost or heat. To accomplish this, the solar panels can be arranged above or between crop rows, or in moveable systems that allow more sunlight through at certain times of the day or growing cycle. Some solar panels are even made of semitransparent material. But panels also need to be placed so farmers and farm machinery have enough room to operate. On the other hand, crops can cool the underside of the panels and boost efficiency.

Raspberries grown under solar panels in the Netherlands.

 Image courtesy of GroenLeven.

Many agrivoltaic trials have reported promising results. For example, a project in southern France found that grapes grown under solar panels needed less irrigation and were of higher quality. A 2019 study in Nature Communications found chile peppers and tomatoes grown under agrivoltaics in Arizona led to higher yields and less drought stress.

And interest is growing. Japan now has more than 3,000 agrivoltaic farms, France has several hundred and, in November 2023, the EU approved a 1.7 billion euro ($1.8 billion) investment in agrivoltaics in Italy.

But Dupraz says caution is needed when extrapolating results to different areas. His study looked at all previous scientific agrivoltaic studies from around the world, using only those that included rigorous control sites. This included trials on lettuce, beans and apples in France; sesame, mung bean and maize in South Korea; kale, broccoli and tomatoes in the U.S.; and more. He found that on the whole, fields with all types of crops yielded less under solar panels compared with control plots.

“Many electricity companies say that pastures love shade,” says Dupraz. “This is not true.”

The study also showed that the ratio of solar panels to land area was a good predictor of crop yields. Even when just a fifth of the ground was covered by solar panels, losses were significant. This also takes into account that some land is taken up by posts, cables and other hardware so can no longer be planted. This is the first time that relationship has been established, says Dupraz, adding that “the impact on policy design is crucial.”

Some countries — notably France, Germany, Italy and Japan — already have regulations that limit how much solar installations on agricultural land are allowed to cut into crop yields. The relationship between the number of solar panels and the yield gives an improved scientific basis for those types of regulations.

In the Netherlands, raspberries grown under semitransparent solar panels had lower sugar content and yields, says Hellen Elissen, project manager of sustainable energy and biomass at Wageningen University & Research. 

Image courtesy of GroenLeven.

Hellen Elissen, project manager of sustainable energy and biomass at Wageningen University & Research, says the study confirms research in the Netherlands.

“What we see is that if you take away the light, your crop yield decreases,” she says. “That doesn’t say that it’s not a viable business case. But it’s not a one-and-one-equals-three business case. It’s always a trade-off between the panels and the crop.”

Elissen says it’s crucial that we understand and work within the limits of the technology. If not, valuable agricultural land could be lost in the pursuit of green energy goals.

Still, there are some situations where agrivoltaics may be advantageous. In the Netherlands, raspberries are typically grown in plastic tunnels to shield them from heat and excessive light. Research is experimenting with growing them under solar panels instead, making more intensive use of the land and also reducing plastic waste.

Dupraz says more data on newer technologies like dynamic tracking that can let more light through at critical periods could show that some crops can tolerate higher levels of shade. The study calls for further research on tropical crops such as vanilla, coffee and cacao that are sometimes already grown under shade in agroforestry systems.

The fact that some trials have reported much higher than average yields is exciting and warrants closer investigation, says Carl Bernacchi, professor of integrative biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bernacchi is part of a multidisciplinary team that will be evaluating agrivoltaics in three different geographic areas in the U.S. as part of the federally funded SCAPES project. Teasing out the influence of crop type, climate, soils, solar installation design and more will show how to “get as much electricity as we can off that land while having absolute minimal impact on the final yield,” he says.

“[Agrivoltaics] has a lot of potential, but it’s not a technology where you can just put a field full of panels … then just throw some crops in between,” Elissen says.

Banner image: Farmers in Bihar, India, growing crops amidst solar panels. Image by C. de Bode/CGIAR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Citations:

Dupraz, C. (2023). Assessment of the ground coverage ratio of agrivoltaic systems as a proxy for potential crop productivity. Agroforestry Systems. doi:10.1007/s10457-023-00906-3

Barron-Gafford, G. A., Pavao-Zuckerman, M. A., Minor, R. L., Sutter, L. F., Barnett-Moreno, I., Blackett, D. T., … & Macknick, J. E. (2019). Agrivoltaics provide mutual benefits across the food–energy–water nexus in drylands. Nature Sustainability, 2(9), 848-855. doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0364-5

Grassroots efforts and an Emmy-winning film help Indigenous fight in Brazil

by Sarah Brown

Mongabay

29 January 2024


The 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.

After years of increasing invasions and deforestation in the protected area, experts say the situation has slowly improved in the past three years, and both Indigenous and government officials in the region “feel a little safer.”

Grassroots surveillance efforts, increased visibility of the problems, and a more effective federal crackdown against invaders have helped tackle illegal land occupiers and allowed the Indigenous populations to take their land back.

Despite the security improvements, however, the territory still struggles against invasions and deforestation within the region, experts say.

Brazil’s Indigenous peoples have come under systemic attacks for five centuries, a crisis that worsened from 2019 to 2022 under the government of Jair Bolsonaro. These hostilities were encapsulated in the Emmy-winning documentary The Territory (O Território), which unveiled the challenges one Indigenous land and its population faced from land grabbers from 2018 to 2021.

The film, which won the award for “exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking” this January, documents an Indigenous group’s fight against conflicts and threats from invaders in the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Territory, an area covering more than 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) of the Amazon Rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. The territory is home to nine Indigenous groups, including the Jupaú (also known as the Uru-eu-wau-wau), the Oro Win, the Amondawa, and the Cabixi, as well as five communities that have not had contact with non-Indigenous people.

Today, the situation in the region has improved, experts say, adding that although threats still exist, the territory has become safer and deforestation has dropped thanks to increasing visibility, local action, and a change in the federal government.

The security improvements in the territory are the result of relentless grassroots efforts to defend the land and bring visibility to the issues playing out there. The film helped amplify these efforts before an international audience, bringing attention not just to the Uru-eu-wau-wau land but to Indigenous territories in general across Brazil.

“The Territory” (“O Território”) won the Emmy for “exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking” in January. From left: Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau, an Indigenous leader featured in the documentary; Txai Suruí, an Indigenous activist and executive producer of the documentary; and Ivandeide Bandeira, also known as Neidinha, an Indigenous activist featured in the documentary. 

Image courtesy of the Kanindé Ethno-Environmental Defense Association.

“It managed to draw attention to the serious situation both in the state of Rondônia and with the federal government and other agencies,” Ivandeide Bandeira, also known as Neidinha, an Indigenous activist who was featured in the documentary, told Mongabay. “We currently have the presence of the National Force [a joint military and civil police unit] in the Burareiro region, where the film was made.”

The Uru-eu-wau-wau land has suffered from land-grabbing invasions since the 1980s, which intensified in 2016. That year, illegal deforestation soared by 248% from the year before, amounting to 547 hectares (1,352 acres), according to data from Brazil’s space agency, INPE. A federal government official familiar with the issue and who asked to remain anonymous told Mongabay that it was around this time that an outpost of Funai, the national agency for Indigenous affairs, in the north of the territory was taken over by land grabbers. “[They] broke into the base, looted it, vandalized it, and occupied it,” the official said.

The outpost, built in 2013 and known as Barreira II, wasn’t in use at the time by Funai, which has long struggled with a lack of personnel and funding. It became a key entry point for invaders into the Indigenous territory, who then started to spread throughout the land.

“It was war,” the official added, referring to the conflict that ensued between the invaders and the Indigenous inhabitants, and “deforestation rocketed” under the pressure of illegal logging and mining.

In 2020, the situation began to improve. “The data is undeniable regarding the reduction in deforestation and invasions, and the increase in population security,” Amanda Villa, an Indigenous affairs adviser at the Observatory of Human Rights of Uncontacted and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI) and researcher at the Amerindian Studies Center at the University of São Paulo, told Mongabay. “Funai and Indigenous people seem to feel a little safer to carry out their work in the territory.”

The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous patrol team and Funai, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, reclaimed an abandoned Funai outpost in June 2022, helping prevent land invasions within the territory. The outpost’s location was a key entry point for land grabbers.

 Image © Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau.

The deforestation rate reached a peak in 2019 at 1,076 hectares (2,659 acres), dropping to 333 hectares (823 acres) in 2020, similar to pre-2016 levels.

Many factors contributed to this change. The Jupaú Association, a surveillance team of Indigenous people featured in the documentary, created a group of “forest guardians” who monitored the land extensively, expelling invaders and filing numerous complaints to the Federal Public Ministry and other government bodies. At the same time, the Federal Police started to conduct operations in the region in 2021. The territory “started to have a lot more systematic work to protect the area,” the federal government official said.

In June 2022, the Jupaú Indigenous surveillance team reactivated the Barreira II outpost and maintained it alongside staff from Funai. Controlling the outpost and monitoring this area was key to preventing the invaders’ entry into the territory. Brazil’s changing political situation also helped. The end of the Bolsonaro administration in 2022 and the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president in 2023 meant the end of the previous government’s anti-Indigenous agenda and impunity for environmental crimes. Instead, Lula created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples — the first in Brazil’s history — revived the process of demarcating Indigenous lands that had been frozen under Bolsonaro, and cracked down on land grabbers and deforestation in the Amazon.

“The general perception is that there still are [invasions and deforestation in the territory], but without the air of legitimacy,” Villa said, adding that there’s no longer a sense of impunity that perpetrators once enjoyed under the Bolsonaro administration.

The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Territory lies in the heart of the state of Rondônia in the western Amazon. For decades, the land has suffered heavy deforestation driven by agricultural expansion, especially cattle ranching and soybean farming, and mining.

Killings and ongoing threats

Two killings occurred during the making of the documentary that gave the Indigenous territory more visibility: that of Rieli Franciscato, a coordinator of Funai’s Ethno-Environmental Protection Front, who was reportedly killed by an arrow from an uncontacted Indigenous person while working in the territory, and that of Ari Uru-eu-wau-wau, both in 2020.

“The area started getting a lot more attention that it didn’t have before, when it was forgotten and abandoned,” the federal government official said.

Mongabay reported in 2022 that two years after Ari’s killing, no one had been arrested and no suspect had been named. A month later, the Federal Police announced they’d arrested a suspect, but ruled out that the murder was related to Ari being Indigenous or to his work in defense of the environment, as originally presumed. Instead, they said the suspect and Ari knew each other and the murder was the result of animosity between the two men. As a result, the case was dropped as a federal crime and transferred to the state court.

Land defense remains a dangerous occupation in Brazil. Data from the Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) found that from 1985 to 2021, there were 2,028 recorded deaths as a result of land conflicts, mostly in the Amazon. Of these cases, about 90% never went to trial

.

The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous patrol team monitors their land for invaders. Land grabbers burn the forest within the Uru-eu-wau-wau territory to create illegal cattle pasture.

 Image © Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau.

Although the situation is improving, invasions and land grabbing continue in the Uru-eu-wau-wau territory, despite the growing international spotlight, and the threats to the Indigenous population remain. Neidinha, her daughter, Txai Suruí, and five other Indigenous people were ambushed in 2023, leading the government to send in the National Force. “The dangerous situation intensified,” Neidinha said.

In May and June last year, the Federal Police launched three operations to investigate the presence of illegal mining and inspect logging companies linked to wood illegally leaving the territory. The three operations yielded a total of 8 million reais ($1.6 million) worth of wood, logging equipment and mining machinery, and resulted in at least two logging companies having their operations suspended.

In June last year, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security authorized the deployment of the National Force to the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Territory for 90 days. It came after the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office requested in February the protection of the area due to complaints of environmental crimes and invasions on the land.

While the struggles in the Uru-eu-wau-wau land continue, the documentary marks the beginning of Indigenous people themselves broadcasting the realities within their territories, bringing international visibility to the threats and challenges they face. The activists and filmmakers of The Territory are currently building a training center inside the Uru-eu-wau-wau land to hold courses and workshops on cinema, videos and related topics, Neidinha said. “We will have Indigenous people making their own films,” she said.

The Territory is available for streaming on Disney+.

Banner image: A framed photo of Ari Uru-eu-wau-wau, who was killed in 2020. Ari was part of the territory’s surveillance team and regularly received death threats from land grabbers. However, the Federal Police ruled out his killing as being related to his land defense work. Image © Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau.

To ease deforestation, natural rubber industry must ‘paddle hard’ (commentary)

Commentary by Aidan Mock 

MONGABAY

30 January 2024


A recent study by the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh found that natural rubber related forest loss has been substantially underestimated and is at least two or three times higher than suggested by previous figures.

The same study shows that at least 2 million hectares of forest has been lost for rubber cultivation since 2000, while the supply chain has begun to come together to define and standardize key requirements for environmental benefit and social equity.

“All eyes in the rubber industry are currently turned towards the EU Deforestation Regulation. There are waves of opportunity that came before the EUDR and there are waves that will come after [but the] organizations that want to set themselves up for long term success will keep this in mind and paddle to good positions to ride all the incoming waves,” a new op-ed argues.

This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Last October, I took some time off work at the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR) to learn how to surf. Surfing has always been a dream of mine and one of the more advanced surfing techniques is learning how to ride green waves (also known as unbroken waves). The image of surfers carving fearlessly across the gaping maw of the ocean is one of the pinnacles of surfing, which is all about riding green waves.

To successfully ride a green wave, you first have to assess the incoming “bumps” in the water that wash in from the open sea. Is this wave going to be big enough? Am I in the right place to catch it? Is someone else better set up to ride the wave? These questions are important both while sitting on a 8-foot piece of foam in the middle of the sea and in an office chair working on supply chain sustainability in downtown Singapore.

After finding a desirable wave, you have to angle your board in the right direction and paddle like your life depends on it. There is a sweet spot to start paddling. If you start too early, your arms will tire by the time the wave arrives and the wave is lost. If you start too late, you might be able to stand up, but you won’t have enough time to adjust and the water will wash you off your feet, dumping you into the salt spray. Timing is key, in both surfing and sustainability. A secret they don’t tell you is that the hardest part of surfing isn’t surfing – it’s paddling. Getting out into the ocean requires paddling, angling your board the right way requires paddling, catching a wave requires paddling. And paddling is really hard, unglamorous work.

Green wave breaking in Maui, Hawaii. I

mage by Kyle/Subtle Cinematics via Unsplash.

But if you’ve gotten the paddling right, and if you’ve chosen the right wave, and if you pop up on your feet just right, the water does the rest of the work and carries you all the way back to shore, with the sunset flickering on the ripples behind you.

As we move into a new year, I am thinking about my surfing experience and how it reflects where the natural rubber industry is at. Right now there are lots of waves approaching the shore and few companies set up to ride them. Some of the waves will be magical and some of them will be duds, the tricky thing is that it’s hard to know which is which. Here are some waves that I think will turn into surfing opportunities, as long as companies are willing to start paddling.

Firstly, environmental information around rubber products is remarkably scarce and there are competitive advantages to be found in obtaining and sharing this information. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are catching on in other industries (such as the concrete industry) and these declarations inform customers about the environmental impacts of any product. The impact metrics within EPDs range from carbon emissions to water pollution. To produce these EPDs, many companies undertake Life Cycle Assessments of their products to calculate the “cradle to gate” impacts of production. As the world becomes more conscious of the environmental impacts of industry, requirements for these declarations are likely to become more onerous, whether through voluntary mechanisms (such as disclosures to investors) or mandatory means like legislation. Additionally, EPDs demonstrate that a product is empirically better in its production processes and companies with higher production standards should utilize environmental disclosures as a non-price competitive mechanism.

From an industry perspective, additional study and disclosure of environmental impacts would enable GPSNR to target capacity building funding in ways that yield more benefits per dollar. Right now, we don’t have the statistics to identify “hot-spots” of environmental impact throughout the supply chain. A consolidated industry approach to study and share data would enable GPSNR to help companies do the work of reducing impacts, benefitting the entire supply chain.

See related: Climate, biodiversity & farmers benefit from rubber agroforestry

Monoculture rubber plantation in Cambodia. 

Image courtesy of Eleanor Warren-Thomas via Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

One way this consolidated effort would be effective is by targeting carbon emissions. With industries working hard and/or under pressure to cut emissions, Life Cycle Assessments enable companies to identify stages of production that are particularly polluting. Targeted investment at the company level or collective action at the industry level is likely to generate increasing returns to scale as compared to a “spray and pray” approach that distributes investments uniformly across the supply chain.

Another discussion that has stalled is the need for smallholder support to ensure supply chain security. Struggling with low rubber prices and low investment in rubber, farmers are now switching to other commodities en masse. Every rubber tree that is replaced by oil palm today is one less “deforestation-free” rubber source tomorrow. In the future, companies may struggle to source enough rubber from deforestation-free sources, especially once rubber prices rebound and demand grows. There are solutions and investments available today, but these require present-day leadership to commit to protecting the future of rubber and the security of its sources. Capacity building projects will help assuage rubber farmers that there is a future for the industry while also increasing yields and reducing environmental impacts. A value transfer mechanism that rewards smallholders for quantifiable sustainability improvements will also help to ensure the operational and environmental sustainability of rubber moving forward.

Taking off my GPSNR hat, there’s one other tire-related discussion that I’m hoping the industry can take the lead on – the health impacts of microplastics generated by tire wear. While this topic is outside the remit of GPSNR, I can’t help but think about potential health impacts that might arise from tire microplastics finding their way into soils, streams, reservoirs, and ultimately the ocean.

How prevalent is this form of pollution and what are the potential health and environmental impacts on the public? There are many unknowns to this discussion, but it feels more pressing as time goes on. The potential for these microplastics to end up in our food, water, and lungs could result in the Silent Spring of our time. There is an opportunity for the industry to take the lead on this discussion and initiate research and mitigation in good faith. This would demonstrate that the industry can be trusted, unlike other industries in the past and present. However, if tire makers are to take the lead on this, the paddling needs to start today.

Rubber latex collecting into a container in a rubber plantation in Thailand. 

Image by Eleanor Warren-Thomas via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Early on in my surf lessons, I kept missing green waves and often ended up falling off my board. When I asked my instructor whether there was any technique or skill I could adopt, he looked blankly at me and said: “Paddle. Paddle harder.” He then proceeded to yell at me to paddle harder for two hours, which was an interesting teaching technique. As I fell into the ocean over and over again, I started to see the importance of picking the right waves, getting the timing right, and paddling like my life depended on it. It took three full days of lessons before I finally rode my first unbroken wave, and it was indeed a glorious feeling.

All eyes in the rubber industry are currently turned towards the EU Deforestation Regulation, the biggest wave to wash up in a long while. This singular focus is understandable but I also see it as a risk. There are waves of opportunity that came before the EUDR and there are waves that will come after. The organizations that want to set themselves up for long term success will keep this in mind and paddle to good positions to ride all the incoming waves. If there’s one thing I learnt from my lessons, true skill isn’t just riding one big wave successfully but instead riding waves consistently, regardless of condition, and setting yourself up to be ready to take advantage of whatever else is coming in.

Aidan Mock is the Impact and Assurance Manager at the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber.

Can ‘degrowth’ solve our ecological, social & economic problems?

by Mike DiGirolamo, Rachel Donald

MONGABAY                               

on 30 January 2024



Economist Tim Parrique speaks with co-host Rachel Donald on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast about the economic model known as “degrowth.”

According to the Lund University researcher, degrowth originated in France in 2002 to address the current “limitless growth” economic model that stretches the ecological limits of the planet — the so-called Planetary Boundaries — unsustainably.

The degrowth concept seeks to provide sustainable development pathways for low- and middle-income countries while stabilizing quality of life in wealthy nations, via producing and consuming less in the latter.

Recent research indicates that the United States wastes 65% of its economic output on things that do not provide essential or quality-of-life needs, bolstering the argument that the economy could be strongly scaled back to decrease its impact on the environment.

Research published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications finds that just in the United States, trillions of dollars are wasted on things that do not improve the quality of life for Americans. Podcast guest Timothée Parrique, an economist and researcher at the Lund University School of Economics and Management, argues this is strong evidence that the United States (and other wealthy, industrialized nations) could significantly scale back production and consumption, thereby decreasing their impact on the planet’s stretched ecological limits — the Planetary Boundaries — allowing low- and middle-income nations the latitude they need to raise their standards of living.

The concept behind this idea is called “degrowth,” says Parrique. On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, he explains exactly how and why he believes it’s time to rethink the global economy and consider how this model could be used to address the planetary polycrisis.

Listen here:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/forcedn/mongabay/TimParrique_mixdown.mp3

Degrowth is generally a misunderstood concept — previous podcast guest Hannah Ritchie, an author and data scientist at Our World in Data, criticized degrowth in her book Not the End of the World, but she was not able to articulate precisely what that meant when asked by co-host Rachel Donald during the interview. Ritchie argued that economies need to continually develop to raise the standard of living for low- and middle-income nations, but she did not specify which variables of the economy, how, in what way or for how long.

In this interview, Parrique dissects these questions in more detail, explaining why using only a single metric such as gross domestic product (GDP) doesn’t correlate to fulfilling the basic life necessities people need to thrive, nor allow nature to survive. In fact, GDP can rise as people’s average longevity and well-being fall, while the biosphere suffers.

Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.

See related reading and audio from the planetary boundaries series

DNA probe uncovers threatened shark species in Thailand’s markets

by Carolyn Cowan 

MONGABAY

30 January 2024

A shark DNA investigation has revealed the presence of shark species threatened with extinction in products commonly sold in Thailand’s markets.

The study identified products derived from 15 shark species, more than a third of which have never been recorded in Thai waters, highlighting the scale of the international shark trade.

Marine conservation groups say the findings underscore that consumers of shark fin soup and other shark products could well be complicit in the demise of threatened species that fulfill vital roles in maintaining ocean balance.

Experts have called on Thai policymakers to improve traceability in shark trade supply chains, expand marine protected areas, and make greater investments in marine research.

Shark conservation groups in Thailand are calling for greater marine protections and improved traceability in shark trade supply chains following a study that identified threatened shark species in products commonly sold in the country’s markets.

The DNA-based study detected 15 shark species in products sampled from retail markets, restaurants, warehouses, seaports and fish landing sites around Thailand. More than half were species listed as threatened with extinction (vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered) on the IUCN Red List, including great hammerheads (Sphyrna mokarran), scalloped hammerheads (Sphyrna lewini) and sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus).

The research team, comprising Thailand’s Department of Fisheries, wildlife advocacy group WildAid and Thailand-based researchers, published their findings last year in Conservation Genetics. In a new report highlighting the implications of the findings, WildAid points to shortcomings with traceability in the international shark fin trade and urges the public to say “no” to shark fin and other shark-derived products.

“What we discovered was probably just the tip of an iceberg,” Petch Manopawitr, a conservation scientist and Thailand program adviser at WildAid, told Mongabay. Given the shark fin trade is notoriously opaque and difficult to monitor, Petch said there’s currently no means of reliably tracing where the sharks identified in the study came from, how they were caught, or by whom.

What is clear, however, is that consumers of shark products, such as shark fin soup, are risking complicity in the demise of keystone species that could have knock-on consequences for the health of the world’s oceans. “To put it in perspective, it is no different from us consuming tigers or even tiger cubs, which is another species crucial to maintaining the balance of the ecosystem,” Petch said.

Many of the fins sampled in the study were very small, likely from juvenile sharks. 

Image by Pimpakarn Laongdee for WildAid.

Despite their vital role as the ocean’s top predators, shark populations have been decimated the world over by overfishing, bycatch and consumer demand for their fins, driving more than one-third of all shark and ray species toward a risk of extinction. Thailand claims to have no targeted shark fisheries and that all of the country’s shark haul is classified as bycatch: incidentally caught by vessels fishing for other species, such as tuna.

While shark finning isn’t banned by law in Thailand, it’s not as prevalent as it once was, according to Sirachai Arunrugstichai, a marine scientist, photojournalist and co-author of the study. “Fins are commonly sourced from sharks that were landed whole after being caught [as bycatch] in industrial fishing gear.”

Notwithstanding the reduced incidence of shark finning, experts have raised concerns that landing whole shark carcasses instead may still incentivize catching sharks by creating additional markets for shark meat, cartilage and other body parts.

Shark fin is commonly found in markets in downtown Bangkok. 

Image by Bruno Gonzalez.

Significant trade and consumption

Thailand is one of the world’s top exporters of shark products. According to a 2015 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the status of the global market for shark products, the Southeast Asian nation specializes in low-quality, often small-sized shark fins. Between 2012 and 2016, Thailand shipped 22,466 metric tons of shark-derived goods overseas, making it the No. 1 exporter globally during that period.

Now, the new findings suggest that despite heightened consumer awareness of the implicit risks of killing sharks to the health of marine ecosystems, the country is also a major market for shark-derived products. Recent surveys of Thailand’s urban population, carried out by WildAid, indicated more than half of respondents intended to consume shark fin in the future. While this figure is lower than in previous surveys, it’s still alarming for conservationists.

“It’s discouraging to see that people are still continuing to consume shark,” Petch said. “The message about shark fin and endangered species has been communicated for such a long time. [People who continue to consume sharks] are either totally ignorant, or just don’t care at all.”

Recent shark landing data from Thailand cover merely 60% of the diversity of species compared to hauls from one decade ago, the WildAid report says, a sign that local shark populations might be “perilously close to collapse.”

In addition to identifying threatened species in the trade, the research team were concerned to uncover a significant proportion of small shark fins, some from critically endangered species. The researchers say this indicates heavy exploitation of juvenile sharks, a practice that could severely hinder the recovery potential of impacted populations.

A researcher prepares shark fin samples for DNA extraction and sequencing. 

Image by Pimpakarn Laongdee for WildAid.

More than one-third of the species identified in the study have never been recorded in Thai waters, including night sharks (Carcharhinus signatus) and dusky smooth-hounds (Mustelus canis). This hints at the magnitude and complexity of the international trade, the authors say, with imports necessary to satisfy local demand for shark products and also to sustain reexport businesses, given that Thailand is a known shark trade hub supplying markets such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

“Given Thailand’s important role in the international trade of shark fin, the country needs to rapidly strengthen its capability to trace the supply chain of shark fin,” the report says. New DNA techniques, like those used in the recent study, have a lot of potential both in Thailand and internationally to boost law enforcement and trade monitoring, Petch said.

Stepping up shark trade traceability would enable Thailand to keep pace with international regulations. Some 85% of the species found in the study were requiem sharks (Carcharhinidae), a family of sharks recently listed in Appendix II of CITES, the global wildlife trade convention. This makes their trade subject to strict controls. However, in a move unique among shark-trading countries, Thailand requested a six-year reservation on the new rules in order to put systems in place to monitor shark landings and trade.

Under current Thai law, whale sharks and four species of hammerhead sharks are the only shark species protected in Thai waters, with attempts to hunt, kill or trade them punishable by a prison term of up to 15 years or fines up to $42,400. However, the Thai Department of Fisheries is in the process of introducing additional protections for two further species of hammerheads alongside a national plan on the conservation and management of sharks.

“The Department of Fisheries acknowledges the crucial role of sharks,” Chalermchai Suwannarak, director-general of the Department of Fisheries, said in a statement released by WildAid. “[The department] is committed to implementing measures that effectively monitor and regulate the trade of shark species listed under CITES, ensuring the sustainable use of sharks.”

But measures and plans are only ever as good as their implementation, Petch said. “The timeline for implementation [of the national plan on sharks] is still unclear,” he said. “We need to be clear why we need strict protections in certain areas and how that is going to benefit not just shark populations, but the whole marine ecosystem. Fish stocks will be better if you have better conservation … and in Thailand we generate a lot of economy through tourism, so conservation of marine species should be a top priority.”

Shark fin prepared for cooking in a market in Thailand.

 Image courtesy of WildAid.

Bycatch solutions paramount

Besides stronger legislation governing trade, ending the overexploitation of sharks depends on reducing their slaughter in the first place. Experts say that solving the problem of fisheries bycatch is paramount.

“Sharks are a reflection of how unsustainable some fishing gears are,” Petch said. “The otter trawl and the paired trawl are the top two gears that catch the most sharks … they’re so powerful, so effective that they basically pretty much catch everything.” He added that up to one-third of Thailand’s commercial fishery catch is classified as noncommercial “trash” fish, a category that includes sharks and typically ends up as animal feed.

“Pet companies have started to import the whole dry shark to give it to dogs and other pets as a snack,” Petch said. “To me it was just, you spend 20 years educating people about how bad shark fin is, and now they’re moving down the food chain to just give it to dogs as a snack. It’s really, really disappointing.”

Restrictions on the use of nonselective fishing gear like otter and paired trawls could go some way to reducing shark bycatch, Petch added, especially if such measures can be implemented in important shark conservation areas.

“Maybe increased shark protections means more seasonal fishery closures,” he said, “but it will restore ecosystem health in the long term and that is much more sustainable and profitable compared to where we are now.”

Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on 𝕏, @CarolynCowan11.

Banner image: Fins from great hammerheads and scalloped hammerheads were for sale in Thailand’s markets. This hammerhead was photographed in Japan. Image by Masayuki Agawa / Ocean Image Bank.

Citations:

Klangnurak, W., Arunrugstichai, S., Manopawitr, P., & Krajangdara, T. (2023). DNA-based species identification of shark fins traded in Thai markets. Conservation Genetics, 24(4), 537-546. doi:10.1007/s10592-023-01519-0

Dulvy, N. K., Pacoureau, N., Rigby, C. L., Pollom, R. A., Jabado, R. W., Ebert, D. A., … Simpfendorfer, C. A. (2021). Overfishing drives over one-third of all sharks and rays toward a global extinction crisis. Current Biology, 31(21), 4773-4787. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.08.062

Worm, B., Orofino, S., Burns, E. S., D’Costa, N. G., Manir Feitosa, L., Palomares, M. L., … Bradley, D. (2024). Global shark fishing mortality still rising despite widespread regulatory change. Science, 383(6679), 225-230. doi:10.1126/science.adf8984

Indonesia invites Turkish investors to develop tuna farms in Papua

by Basten Gokkon

MONGABAY

on 30 January 2024

Indonesia has invited Turkish investors to participate in offshore tuna farming in the Papua region’s Biak Numfor district, aiming to make it a hub for tuna exports.

The Indonesian fisheries ministry said Turkish fisheries operators can bring innovation to enhance productivity and ensure sustainability of the tuna fishery.

Indonesia, a significant contributor to global tuna production, faces sustainability challenges due to excessive harvesting of wild tuna.

The outreach to Türkiye is the latest in efforts to get foreign investors to help develop Indonesia’s various fisheries, including a similar offer earlier in January for Vietnam to invest in lobster farms.

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has invited Turkish investors to help develop an offshore tuna farm in the country’s eastern Papua region, which it aims to turn into a major tuna export hub.

The move is the latest outreach by Indonesia’s fisheries ministry to other countries to invest in and develop its fisheries potential. Earlier in January, the minister made a similar offer to Vietnam to invest in lobster farming.

On a recent visit to Türkiye, the Indonesian fisheries minister, Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, said Turkish investment and aquaculture technology could help kick-start tuna farming in the waters of Biak Numfor district in Papua province. The minister spoke at a fish-fattening farm in the Türkiye’s Gulf of İzmir, where various marine fish species, including Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), are held in pens after being captured from the wild and fed to increase their weight.

“Some of our territorial waters are habitat for tuna, so we need innovation to increase the productivity of this commodity and ensure its sustainability,” Trenggono said in a statement published Jan. 24.

Indonesian fisheries minister Sakti Wahyu Trenggono visits a tuna farm in the Gulf of İzmir, Türkiye. Image courtesy of the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries.

At the start of his second term in office, in 2019, President Joko Widodo ordered the fisheries ministry to boost the country’s aquaculture productivity. Indonesia’s tuna fishery is an important source of livelihood for coastal communities in the Southeast Asian nation and a key source of food for consumers around the world, contributing about 16% to the total global tuna production.

However, the excessive harvesting of wild tuna in Indonesian waters has rendered the fishery unsustainable. A substantial portion of the country’s fishing areas in the Pacific and Indian oceans has been fully utilized, leading to overfishing of numerous tuna species.

Trenggono said Turkish investors were specifically interested in Biak Numfor, located within the biodiverse Cenderawasih Bay and part of the Pacific Coral Triangle, the leading hotspot for marine biodiversity.

“This is the most suitable area because it borders the northern Pacific waters, so the most suitable location is Biak [and] Kupang which is very close to the Indian [Ocean] waters,” Trenggono told Mongabay on the sidelines of an event in Jakarta.

The Papuan district last November opened its first so-called modern fishing village with key infrastructure for tuna fisheries, such as ice factories, cold storage, catch-landing shelters and docking yards, all built by the central government. Other supporting facilities include a training center, clean water installation, drainage, street lighting, waste water management installation, and management office.

The tuna fishery in Biak Numfor is a rich source of yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), with officials estimating it could produce up to 1 million metric tons annually. There are also plans to expand direct export by air from Papua to Japan, one of Indonesia’s top tuna buyers. Currently, there’s only one flight a week flying that route. There were 29 freight shipments between January and August 2023, with a total of 140.4 metric tons of tuna sent to Japan from Biak Numfor, according to the district fisheries agency.

Indonesia’s waters are also home to several other species of commercially valuable tuna, including longfin or albacore (T. alalunga), bigeye (T. obesus) and southern bluefin (T. maccoyii).

Indonesian tuna fishers in Papua province. 

Image courtesy of the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries.

In 2021, Indonesia caught 791,000 metric tons of tuna, with a total value of about $1.4 billion. About a fifth of this catch was exported, primarily to United States, Japan, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, Australia, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines.

The growth of Indonesia’s fisheries is part of a global trend in aquaculture, which expanded by 527% between 1990 and 2018, with Indonesia one of the top contributors. In the third quarter of 2021, Indonesia’s aquaculture output reached 12.25 million metric tons, reflecting a 6% rise from the same period in 2020. The aquaculture sector has also grown in economic importance, generating revenue in excess of government targets, according to the fisheries ministry.

The ministry has implemented various initiatives to maintain sustainable levels of tuna production. These include implementing harvest controls, monitoring specific species in selected fisheries areas, regulating the use of fish-aggregating devices, and pushing for international-standard sustainability certification among fishers. Developing tuna farms is the latest in efforts to ease the pressure on wild stocks.

The government is also pushing for more tuna fisheries in Indonesia to achieve sustainability certification and eco-labeling. Numerous programs are available to ensure the certification of sustainable fish stocks, minimize environmental impacts, uphold labor rights, establish transparency and traceability in the supply chain, and govern management according to best practices.

A fisherman shows off a skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands. Image courtesy of Yayasan Masyarakat dan Perikanan Indonesia (MDPI).

Basten Gokkon is a senior staff writer for Indonesia at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @bgokkon.