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)
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Manganese cathodes could boost lithium-ion batteries
Manganese is earth-abundant and cheap. A new process could help make it a contender to replace nickel and cobalt in batteries.
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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A new process for manganese-based battery materials lets researchers use larger particles, imaged here by a scanning electron microscope.
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are growing in adoption, used in devices like smartphones and laptops, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems. But supplies of nickel and cobalt commonly used in the cathodes of these batteries are limited. New research led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) opens up a potential low-cost, safe alternative in manganese, the fifth most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust.
Researchers showed that manganese can be effectively used in emerging cathode materials called disordered rock salts, or DRX. Previous research suggested that to perform well, DRX materials had to be ground down to nanosized particles in an energy-intensive process. But the new study found that manganese-based cathodes can actually excel with particles that are about 1000 times larger than expected. The work was published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
“There are many ways to generate power with renewable energy, but the importance lies in how you store it,” said Han-Ming Hau, who researches battery technology as part of Berkeley Lab’s Ceder Group and is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. “By applying our new approach, we can use a material that is both earth-abundant and low-cost, and that takes less energy and time to produce than some commercialized Li-ion battery cathode materials. And it can store as much energy and work just as well.”
The researchers used a novel two-day process that first removes lithium ions from the cathode material and then heats it at low temperatures (about 200 degrees Celsius). This contrasts with the existing process for manganese-based DRX materials, which takes more than three weeks of treatment.
Researchers used state-of-the-art electron microscopes to capture atomic-scale pictures of the manganese-based material in action. They found that after applying their process, the material formed a nanoscale semi-ordered structure that actually enhanced the battery performance, allowing it to densely store and deliver energy.
The team also used different techniques with X-rays to study how battery cycling causes chemical changes to manganese and oxygen at the macroscopic level. By studying how the manganese material behaves at different scales, the team opens up different methods for making manganese-based cathodes and insights into nano-engineering future battery materials.
“We now have a better understanding of the unique nanostructure of the material,” Hau said, “and a synthesis process to cause this ‘phase change’ in the material that improves its electrochemical performance. It’s an important step that pushes this material closer to battery applications in the real world.”
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to delivering solutions for humankind through research in clean energy, a healthy planet, and discovery science. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Microscopic views of the manganese material show an ordered nanoscale structure separated by special disordered “antiphase boundaries.” The unique microscopic structure formed by the transformation process enhances the battery performance, allowing it to densely store and deliver energy.
Earth-abundant Li-ion cathode materials with nanoengineered microstructures
Article Publication Date
19-Sep-2024
Disclaimer: AAA
Research alert: First evidence of mitochondrial genetics' role in Gulf War illness
University of California - San Diego
A first-of-its kind study from researchers at University of California San Diego has revealed that Gulf War illness (GWI), a chronic fatigue illness affecting veterans of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, is linked to genetic variants in mitochondria, the energy-producing structures of cells. The findings shed new light on how GWI, which is thought to be triggered by environmental toxins, develops. The findings could also have implications for other diseases with environmental triggers, such as Parkinson’s disease and certain types of cancer.
Mitochondria have their own DNA, passed down through the maternal line rather than from both parents. The researchers found that the severity of GWI was directly associated with inherited genetic variants in mitochondrial DNA. Veterans with these genetic variants, which are known to be associated with other diseases involving mitochondrial dysfunction, scored significantly higher in measures of Gulf War illness severity. This suggests that people with these variants may be predisposed to more severe symptoms following a toxic exposure.
The findings support an emerging hypothesis from the research team that, contrary to the common understanding of GWI as an inflammatory disease, it is actually driven by mitochondrial dysfunction rather than inflammation.
The study was published August 21, 2024 in BMC Research Notes and was led by Beatrice A. Golomb M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Leann Bui, M.D., a resident physician in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
Ice cores show pollution's impact on Arctic atmosphere
Dartmouth study solves marine mystery by tying ocean biomarker to pollution levels
Dartmouth College
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The Dartmouth-led study analyzed ice core data from Greenland and a 700-foot core members of the research team extracted from Denali National Park and Preserve in 2013. The Denali ice core contains a millennium of climate data in the form of gas bubbles, particulates, and compounds trapped in the ice.
A Dartmouth-led study on ice cores from Alaska and Greenland found that air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels reaches the remote Arctic in amounts large enough to alter its fundamental atmospheric chemistry. The findings illustrate the long reach of fossil fuel emissions and provide support for the importance of clean-air rules, which the team found can reverse the effect.
The impact of pollution on the Arctic began as soon as widespread fossil fuel usage took hold during the industrial era, according to a report in Nature Geoscience. The researchers detected this footprint in an unexpected place—they measured declines in an airborne byproduct of marine phytoplankton activity known as methanesulfonic acid, or MSA, captured in the ice cores when air pollution began to rise.
Phytoplankton are key species in ocean food webs and carbon cycles considered a bellwether of the ocean's response to climate change. MSA has been used by scientists as an indicator of reduced phytoplankton productivity and, thus, of an ocean ecosystem in distress.
But the Dartmouth-led team reports that MSA also plummets in environments high in emissions generated by burning fossil fuels, even if phytoplankton numbers are stable. Their models showed that these emissions cause the initial molecule that phytoplankton produce—dimethyl sulfide—to turn into sulfate instead of MSA, leading to a deceptive drop in MSA levels.
The researchers found precipitous drops in MSA that coincided with the start of industrialization. When Europe and North America began burning large amounts of fossil fuels in the mid-1800s, MSA began to plummet in Greenland ice cores. Then, nearly a century later, the same biomarker plummeted in ice cores from Alaska around the time when East Asia underwent large-scale industrialization.
"Our study is a stark example of how air pollution can substantially alter atmospheric chemistry thousands of miles away. The pollution emitted in Asia or Europe was not contained there," says Jacob Chalif, first author of the study and a graduate student in the lab of senior author Erich Osterberg, an associate professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth.
"By releasing all this pollution into the world, we're fundamentally altering atmospheric processes," Chalif says. "The fact that these remote areas of the Arctic see these undeniable human imprints shows that there's literally no corner of this planet we haven't touched."
The new study solves a yearslong marine mystery surrounding the significance of MSA, says Osterberg, who led the extraction of a 700-foot ice core from Denali National Park and Preserve that the researchers used in their analysis. Osterberg collected the core in 2013 with study coauthors and professors Cameron Wake at the University of New England, and Karl Kreutz and Dartmouth alumnus Dominic Winski '09—who also received his PhD from Dartmouth in 2018—at the University of Maine.
The Denali core contains a millennium of climate data in the form of gas bubbles, particulates, and compounds trapped in the ice, including MSA, which is a common target in ice-core analysis. For centuries, MSA in the Denali core underwent minor fluctuations, "until the mid-20th century when it falls off a table," Osterberg says.
Researchers in Osterberg's ICE Lab, initially led by study coauthor and Dartmouth alumnus David Polashenski '17, started investigating what the precipitous drop in MSA levels indicated about the North Pacific. Osterberg and study coauthor Bess Koffman, a professor at Colby College who was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth, later tested numerous theories to explain why Denali MSA declined. Like the Greenland study, they first considered whether the MSA drop was evidence for a crash in marine productivity, "but nothing added up," Osterberg says. "It was a mystery."
Chalif picked up the project around the time when study coauthor and Dartmouth alumna Ursula Jongebloed '18, now a graduate student at the University of Washington, was re-evaluating a 2019 study on ice cores in Greenland reporting that MSA there underwent a steady drop beginning in the 1800s. That study tied the decline to a crash in phytoplankton populations in the subarctic Atlantic due to a slowdown in ocean currents.
But Jongebloed's work led to a study published last year reporting that declines in MSA found in the Greenland ice cores are not the result of the marine ecosystem crashing. Instead, they could be caused by pollution preventing the creation of MSA in the first place.
Chalif and Jongebloed connected at a conference in Switzerland in 2022 and discussed the Greenland and Denali MSA records. "We rethought all of our prior assumptions," Chalif says. "We knew that the declining MSA at Denali wasn't due to marine productivity, so we knew some kind of change in atmospheric chemistry must be involved."
They discussed the possible effect of nitrate pollution, which is commonly emitted through burning fossil fuels. Chalif started digging into the impact of nitrate on MSA that same evening.
"Pretty much to the year, when MSA declines at Denali, nitrate skyrockets. A very similar thing happened in Greenland," Chalif says. "At Denali, MSA is relatively flat for 500 years, no notable trend. Then in 1962 it plummets. Nitrate was similar, but in the opposite direction—it's basically flat for centuries then it spikes upward. When I saw that I had a eureka moment."
Their results showed that air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels disperses across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and inhibits the production of MSA in the Arctic. In addition to ruling out widespread marine ecosystem collapse, the findings open a new door to using MSA levels to measure pollution in the atmosphere, especially in regions with no obvious emissions sources, the researchers report.
"Marine ecosystem collapse just wasn't working as an explanation for these MSA declines, and these young scientists figured out what was really going on," Osterberg says.
"For me, it's a new way of understanding how pollution affects our atmosphere," he says. "The good news is that we are not seeing the collapse of marine ecosystems we thought we were. The bad news is that air pollution is causing this."
But the data from the Greenland core shows that the local atmosphere began to stabilize when European and American air pollution became more regulated, Osterberg says. MSA rebounded in the 1990s as levels of nitrogen pollution dropped. That's because nitrogen oxides, the type of pollution that affects MSA, dissipate within a few days, unlike carbon dioxide that lingers in the atmosphere for centuries.
"These data show the power of regulations to reduce air pollution, that they can have an immediate effect once you turn off the spigot," Osterberg says. "I worry about younger people resigning to an environmental crisis because all we hear about is bad news. I think it's important to acknowledge good news when we get it. Here, we see that regulations can work."
Erich Osterberg
Researchers in the lab of Erich Osterberg (pictured), an associate professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth, found that levels of methanesulfonic acid (MSA), an airborne byproduct of marine phytoplankton activity, were stable for centuries before plummeting in the mid-20th century. They initially investigated whether the precipitous drop indicated a crash in marine productivity in the North Pacific before finding that MSA also plummets in environments high in emissions generated by burning fossil fuels, even if marine ecosystems are stable.
Pollution drives multidecadal decline in subarctic methanesulfonic acid
Article Publication Date
23-Sep-2024
CLIMATE CRISIS
Lack of food — not money — drives poaching in East African national parks
Penn State
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — National parks in East Africa protect endangered wildlife but sometimes do not support local human populations, according to Edwin Sabuhoro, assistant professor of recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State. New research by Sabuhoro and two Penn State doctoral students from East Africa demonstrated that poverty and lack of adequate food supply drive most of the poaching and other illegal activities in one such park.
The researchers, led by Gasto Lyakurwa, doctoral student in recreation, park, and tourism, management at Penn State, surveyed 267 household heads in eight villages that border Mkomazi National Park in northern Tanzania. The survey focused on their use of park land and their family’s food security, financial security and educational security to understand which factors led to illegal park use. Their results were published in Conservation.
Mkomazi National Park comprises more than 1,250 square miles of protected habitat for rare and endangered wildlife including elephants, lions, buffalo and rhinoceroses. The park, created in 1951, displaced large numbers of people from the park land into surrounding regions two times — once in the early 1950s and again in the late 1980s.
Since the foundation of the park — and other protected areas throughout East Africa — the researchers said park officials and rangers have viewed local people as a threat, rather than as a potential conservation partner.
“For countless generations, the people in this area relied on that land for meat, traditional medicines, firewood, fish and timber,” Lyakurwa said. “These resources were essential to the people’s livelihood, but suddenly, they were cut off from the land. Even though local people told us they feel connected to the wild animals, they also made it clear that they are not likely to respect park boundaries if they cannot feed themselves or their children.”
Tourism in the park — driven largely by visitors who want to see the large mammals — generates income that is managed by the national government, the researchers said. Some park revenue is used to fund projects designed to improve the lives of the 45,000 people who live in the 22 villages near the park. Though many government programs have focused on improving infrastructure for health care and education, the results of this study indicate that alleviating food insecurity and poverty are the only ways to build cooperation between the parks and the villages, the researchers said.
Of the 267 families surveyed, 253 earned their livelihood through agriculture — either growing crops or raising grazing animals for food. The average annual household income for these families was $1,115 United States dollars, and 74% of household heads had been educated only through primary school.
When asked about if and why they used the park for illegal animal grazing or poaching, many villagers reported that they did use park land. The researchers compared these results to people’s statements about their family’s consistent access to — or “security” in — food, education and adequate finances.
Results showed that food security was the primary driver of illegal activity, while education security and financial security had minimal influence on poaching.
The researchers said the findings demonstrated that people poach for food, not to enrich themselves or to pay for their children’s education. To successfully protect wildlife and their habitat, parks need to address food security for residents, the researchers said.
“Communities are expected to support conservation, but they are facing deprivation,” Lyakurwa said. “Animals — especially elephants and lions — come out of the parks and trample crops and injure or kill people. Also, the people feel they need park lands to graze their own animals. It is easy to understand why they are not more supportive of park boundaries when their lives are at stake.”
In addition to existential concerns, many villagers told the researchers that they believe more money earned from tourism in the park should be used to support people in the area, but that much of the money is extracted to fund other projects around the nation. Sabuhoro said that this common frustration inspired him to help spearhead a regional effort to reduce conflicts between the needs of humans and wildlife.
“Traditionally, local people have been expected to comply with rules but have not been invited to participate in the planning or benefits associated with the parks,” Sabuhoro said. “Through the Human Wildlife Co-existence Research Network, we are trying to change that.”
Sabuhoro helps lead the network, which brings together non-governmental organizations, government officials, academics, park leadership and local people across East Africa to address ways conservation efforts can support the needs of local communities and local communities can support conservation efforts.
“People in each nation are expressing their own needs and developing their own solutions,” Sabuhoro said. “Last year, we held a conservation stakeholders meeting in Uganda. This year, we had a meeting in Tanzania, and next year we have meetings planned in Kenya and Rwanda.”
To support and expand the work of the Human Wildlife Co-existence Research Network, Sabuhoro sought to recruit and train a researcher from East Africa. After combing through many applications, he said that he found an ideal candidate in Lyakurwa.
Lyakurwa was born in Tanzania and previously worked as a park ranger there. This meant that he had the language skills, cultural knowledge and perspective needed to conduct studies like this one. Sabuhoro also emphasized that local connections are needed to build trust.
“Traditionally, western researchers studied African animals or people and then left without helping the local community understand the results of the study or providing any sustained tangible benefits,” Sabuhoro said. “When the researcher has local connections like Gasto does, there is more faith that the researcher will bring the knowledge back to the community.”
Lyakurwa agreed.
“They can hold me accountable because I am from there,” he said. “I believe that helps me get more honest and complete answers from people — both villagers and park rangers. All these people are trying to what is right in a difficult situation, but they need to feel safe to explain themselves.”
Sabuhoro said universities like Penn State play an important role in training local people like Lyakurwa and Mercy Chepkemoi Chepkwony, graduate student in recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State and the other co-author of this research.
“By training local people in research methods and helping to develop and support meaningful research projects, we can help support management of parks in ways that are sustainable for humans and animals alike,” Sabuhoro said.
Illegal Activities for Survival: Understanding the Influence of Household Livelihood Security on Biodiversity Conservation in Tanzania
New Forest Service study backs conservation at a landscape scale to protect a near threatened bird species
Understanding landscape-scale habitat needs is vital for conserving the near threatened Kirtland’s Warbler
USDA Forest Service ‑ Southern Research Station
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A new study shows that home range and core area of several populations of Kirtland's Warbler in the Bahamas are tightly linked with the age of the vegetation and the way food resources are distributed in the environment.
Understanding the factors that influence how species select their habitats is crucial to inform conservation strategies, especially for vulnerable species. A new study about how wintering individuals of the Kirtland’s Warbler (Setophaga kirtlandii) in the Bahamas use available space and food resources showed that the home range and core area of several populations within this island are tightly linked with the age of the vegetation and the way food resources are distributed in the environment.
Factors like food availability, predation risk, and competition between individuals of the same species influence how species use space. With birds that migrate from breeding grounds in northern regions to nonbreeding grounds in the tropics, these factors may result in multiple space use strategies, for example having fixed home ranges instead of moving in flocks.
The near threatened (IUCN 2023) Kirtland’s Warbler tends to exhibit flexible space use on its Bahamas wintering grounds. This Nearctic-Neotropical migrant overwinters in the Bahamas during the November to April dry season, when its food resources (fruit and arthropods) decline at some sites. These changes force many individuals to move from food-poor to food-rich sites, and in drought years, these shifts may result in significant variation in the density of individuals across space.
Knowing the extent and degree of overlap of the non-breeding home range of this species in their wintering grounds in the Bahamas, and which areas are most intensively used, i.e. their “core areas,” can provide unique insight into the factors that most affect space and resource use of this species. Previous work has addressed some of these issues but did not consider the full extent of space used by individual birds. Resighting observations were also restricted to accessible study sites which likely resulted in an underestimation of warbler’s space use.
A team of scientists from the USDA Forest Service (Joseph M. Wunderle, Eileen Helmer, Javier E. Mercado, Dave Currie), Antioch University of New England (Michael E. Akresh) and the American Bird Conservancy (David N. Ewert) used radio telemetry to quantify size and overlap of space use by sedentary Kirtland’s Warblers in Eleuthera, the Bahamas, to identify some of the variables influencing non-breeding space use. They also related home range and core area size to factors known to influence these variables, such as bird sex and age class, year, winter period, forest age since disturbance, vegetation structure, fruit biomass and fruit shrub foliage cover.
Researchers found that the warbler’s sedentary non-breeding home range was larger than most other wintering Nearctic-Neotropical migratory passerine birds studied to date. “While it is currently difficult to make comparisons with other migrant species, finding that the home range of the Kirtland’s Warbler in the Bahamas was so relatively large was consistent with our prior observations that availability of the warbler’s food supply was so variable. It seems that food availability in the areas they forage is highly variable which sort of forces them to be more flexible in their use of available space and habitats,” commented Wunderle, lead author of the study. Further, except for adult females, which were found to have smaller core area sizes than juveniles or males, age class and sex differences were found to hold no relationship with home range and core area sizes.
The warblers’ ability to exploit other food resources, such as arthropods, likely explain why neither home range nor core area size were correlated with fruit biomass or fruit shrub foliage abundance. Despite this, researchers suggest that less abundant fruit in older vegetation areas likely force warblers to expand their foraging activities to more distant places, thereby driving the observed increase in home range and core size area with vegetation age. Because arthropods are more abundant in mid-to-mature forests, they suspect that sampling artifacts may have obscured the role of fruit availability in this respect.
“It was also interesting to see that the abundance of fruit shrubs could explain so much of the home range overlap observed,” added study co-author Helmer. This was different to what they observed for core areas, where average overlap was more limited, especially between early vs. midwinter sites. “That is often indicative of neighboring warblers being more territorial or avoiding interacting with other individuals of its own species,” further noted Wunderle.
Findings in this study prompted authors to highlight that management at a landscape scale, as on the breeding grounds, will be required to sustain sufficient patches with food resources for this near threatened warbler. Further recommendations included focusing conservation efforts in areas where fruit production and arthropod abundance are least affected by late winter droughts and on younger vegetation areas with reoccurring disturbances, as those tend to favor fruit shrub establishment.
As it prepares to host the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP 30, the first COP to be held in the Amazon) in November 2025, Brazil is at a crucial moment. Its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets are still within reach, but socioenvironmental actions and policies focusing on conserving or restoring forests and biomes need to be strengthened. This is one of the key points made by Brazilian scientists in an article published in the journal Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation.
The authors are affiliated with the National Space Research Institute (INPE) and the National Disaster Surveillance and Early Warning Center (CEMADEN).
The article addresses challenges in conserving and restoring Brazilian biomes, combating deforestation and forest degradation, restoring native vegetation, and promoting vegetation regrowth in secondary forests. It advocates strengthening and expanding policies to maintain ecosystem services, implementing consistent mechanisms to attract investment in restoration activities and payment for environmental services in all biomes, fostering bioeconomy initiatives, and creating new environmental protection areas.
For biologist Liana Oighenstein Anderson, Dutra’s thesis advisor and a researcher at CEMADEN, even when there are preventive measures, they are insufficient to tackle the challenges posed by climate change. “The wildfires seen this year in the Amazon and Pantanal are a case in point. Prevention wasn’t sufficient to contain the alarming numbers. When we do estimates like those in the study, we get the feeling we’re being highly conservative in light of what’s actually happening and the challenges Brazil faces,” Anderson told Agência FAPESP.
This has been a record year for fires in Brazil, with 65,325 fire incidences reported in the first seven months – the highest number for almost 20 years. The previous record was 69,184 in the corresponding period of 2005, according to data from INPE. The Amazon and Cerrado biomes are the worst hit (28,396 and 22,217 respectively).
In the Pantanal, the number of reported fires in the period reached 4,756, the highest since records began in 1998. The highest annual total in this biome was recorded in 2020.
“In 2020, fires in the Pantanal, which is in Brazil’s central region, drew the world’s attention and led to a number of reactions. For example, the Ministry for Science and Technology created Rede Pantanal, and the state of Mato Grosso do Sul implemented an integrated fire management plan. In 2023, the federal government announced a management plan for the biome, and Mato Grosso do Sul declared a state of emergency in April. So there have been actions relating to management, governance and regulation to try to avoid fires, but unfortunately they aren’t enough. We’ve seen progress, but we need better governance, improved strategies, and more funds. Everything must be done faster,” Anderson said.
For Luiz Aragão, last author of the article and a researcher at INPE, the study is a wakeup call to society regarding greenhouse gas emissions and related issues. “Society must address the problem not just from the environmental standpoint but also socioeconomically. It’s all connected. Deforestation, for example, tends to be followed by fire, which is a public health hazard and degrades the forest. Degraded land where the forest has been cleared has less potential to provide ecosystem services, such as the water cycle and biodiversity, which safeguard the quality of life for local communities and exert a significant influence on economic activity,” he said.
Changes in land use and land cover (such as deforestation to raise cattle and grow crops, or forest degradation) are the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil. As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, negotiated at the 2015 UN climate change conference in France, Brazil undertook to help keep global warming at or below 1.5 °C compared with the preindustrial level (1850-1900), but the average temperature rise has far surpassed this limit in recent months.
The COP30 agenda includes a review of the Paris Agreement, which requires all signatories to commit to 2030 greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. Brazil has promised 53% compared with 2005. Nevertheless, net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) due to land use and land-cover changes doubled between 2017 and 2022, according to the Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimating System (SEEG). As for restoration, Brazil has promised to rewild 12 million hectares of former native forest (an area almost the size of Portugal).
Difficulties
According to the article, halting or reversing the growth of deforestation in all six biomes is a major challenge. The authors note that the destruction of native vegetation has averaged 2 million hectares per year or more since 2016, when Brazil submitted its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement rules.
In 2022 alone, some 2.8 million hectares were deforested, mainly in the Amazon and Cerrado. This was the highest rate since 2008 and represented 23% of Brazil’s restoration goal. In addition, restoration of native vegetation is required in some 16 million hectares inadequately conserved as “legal reserves” on private property, more than half in the Amazon and 25% in the Cerrado.
Another finding highlighted by the researchers is the growth of secondary forest areas, which have high carbon capture capacity but are not protected by specific legislation. According to the article, 5.46 million hectares of secondary forest grew outside public land between 2017 and 2022 – 40% in the Amazon, 36% in the Atlantic Rainforest biome, and 19% in the Cerrado. Although this is almost half of Brazil’s restoration goal, maintenance of secondary forests as carbon sinks is endangered owing to their vulnerability to deforestation and degradation, including fire and logging.
Recommended action
In the article, the researchers recommend action to conserve and restore biomes in line with the carbon emission reduction effort to which Brazil is committed, including measures to combat illegal deforestation, legislation to protect secondary forests, stronger law enforcement and environmental inspection, large-scale initiatives to restore native vegetation, and economic incentives for landowners to conserve forest areas via payment for ecosystem services.
Incentives such as these will also be important to conserve forest areas that could legally be cleared as the law now stands. These areas are in properties where native vegetation accounts for a larger percentage than the mandatory “legal reserve”. According to the article, 38% of the total “surplus legal reserve” is in the Cerrado, 23% in the Caatinga, 13% in the Atlantic Rainforest biome, and 10% in the Amazon.
National legislation is needed to increase protection of secondary forests outside legal reserve and permanent conservation areas so as to ensure that they contribute to carbon sequestration in the long term. “Existing laws and measures are insufficient to bring about change,” Aragão said. “The global climate is different. It won’t be possible to solve environmental problems, which are getting more severe because of climate change, if we rely solely on past thinking. We must pivot to future thinking.”
The Ministry for the Environment and Climate Change told Agência FAPESP via its press office that it has taken steps to achieve its commitment to “zero deforestation in all biomes by 2030”. The measures taken include União com MunicÃpios (“Union with Municipalities”), a program launched in April as part of the Action Plan to Prevent and Control Deforestation in Legal Amazonia (PPCDAm), with BRL 785 million allocated to 70 priority municipalities, 48 of which have so far signed the adherence agreement; and tightening of the rules used by the National Monetary Council (CMN), such as banning farm loans to landowners whose permits under the Rural Environmental Register (CAR), designed to ensure compliance with the Forest Code, have been suspended or who have broken the law on Indigenous Territories, conservation units and undesignated public forests.
In addition, the ministry highlighted resumption of the Amazon Fund, with new contracts worth BRL 1.4 billion and further donations set to reach BRL 3.1 billion. An anti-deforestation action plan similar to PPCDAm has been launched for the Cerrado. On restoration, it cited the National Plan for Restoration of Native Vegetation, which aims to extend and strengthen public policy, financial incentives, markets, restoration and rehabilitation technologies, and agricultural best practices, and will be updated this year.
Next steps
According to Dutra, next steps for the researchers will focus on the economic losses caused by deforestation, further developing the data used in the latest study.
“Estimating the cost of the impact is highly valuable in our view, especially to show it‘s much cheaper to prevent than to reconstruct. Brazil does quite a lot in terms of responses to extreme events and natural disasters but needs to invest in prevention,” Aragão said.
For Anderson, more and better dialogue is needed among federal, state and municipal institutions, the third sector, and local communities. Penalties for inaction or failure to implement plans are another requirement. “Our capacity for dialogue is very limited,” he said. “It’s hindered by political distortions and falls well short of what can be done technically to make faster progress.”
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.
