WHY CAPITALI$M IS UNSUSTAINABLE

The cost of preventing extinction of Australia’s priority species

A new study has estimated it would cost $15.6 billion per year for 30 years to prevent extinction for 99 of Australia’s priority species.

Griffith University

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The critically endangered orange-bellied parrot 

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Credit: Dejan Stojanovic

A new study has estimated it would cost $15.6 billion per year for 30 years to prevent extinction for 99 of Australia’s priority species. 

The research, led by Griffith University’s Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security with WWF-Australia and the University of Queensland, highlights the urgent need for increased funding to combat threats such as habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change.

Australia has already lost more than 100 endemic species in the past three centuries, placing it at the forefront of the global extinction crisis. 

The Australian Government has made a commitment to reverse the decline of 110 priority species.

The research looked at the cost for preventing extinction for 99 of these species.

Lead author Dr Michelle Ward said while the annual $15.6 billion could prevent the imminent extinction of many threatened species, there were some species, including many frogs, which were found to be non-recoverable, largely due to climate change.

“Species such as Mountain-top Nursery Frog and Swan Galaxias were found to be of real concern and need active ex-situ conservation,” Dr Ward said.

“The cost to reverse the decline of priority species and undo damage done by habitat loss, disease and other threats was estimated at $103.7 billion annually, while getting them off the threatened list entirely would require $157.7 billion per year.”

Dr Romola Stewart, a co-author and WWF-Australia’s Head of Evaluation and Science, said the paper highlighted the true cost of ineffective nature laws and inadequate species funding.

"Australia’s ever-growing list of threatened species is a direct result of decades of under spending," she said. 

“Turning this tragedy around will take a dramatic increase in action and investment.

“This is achievable for a wealthy nation like Australia.

"If we fail to put our wildlife and wild places on a path to recovery, our economy and environment will suffer, and we will see more species silently slide towards extinction."   

The study also highlighted the broader benefits of conservation investment, including the co-benefits to 43 per cent of all other threatened species and improved ecosystem services essential for human wellbeing. 

"The natural world is undergoing profound change," Dr Ward said. 

“Biodiversity loss and ecosystems collapse is ranked by the World Economic Forum as the second most significant global risk over the next decade, with 50 per cent of the global economy dependent on nature.

“There is merit in the Australian Government’s commitment, but urgent action is needed.”

The study ‘The estimated cost of preventing extinction and progressing recovery for Australia’s priority threatened species’ has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Images available for download here.

ENDS

 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2414985122 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

The estimated cost of preventing extinction and progressing recovery for Australia’s priority threatened species

Article Publication Date

4-Feb-2025

 

Study examines how African farmers are adapting to mountain climate change

Colorado State University

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In the Kigezi highlands of Uganda, some African farmers are diversifying their livelihoods using small tea plantations and wood lots, pictured here, to adapt to climate change. Photo by Aida Cuni-Sanchez

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Credit: Aida Cuni-Sanchez

A new international study highlights the severity of climate change impacts across African mountains, how farmers are adapting, and the barriers they face – findings relevant to people living in mountain regions around the world.  

"Mountains are the sentinels of climate change,” said Julia Klein, a Colorado State University professor of ecosystem science and sustainability and co-author of the study. “Like the Arctic, some of the first extreme changes we're seeing are happening in mountains, from glaciers melting to extreme events. There's greater warming at higher elevations, so what's happening in mountains is foreshadowing what's going to happen for the rest of the world.”  

Global studies have shown that temperatures are rising more rapidly in mountain regions than at lower elevations, but there has been a lack of climate data for African mountains. To start to fill this gap in information, researchers interviewed 1,500 farmers across 10 African mountain regions to understand how the climate has changed, the impacts those changes are having on local livelihoods, and how farmers are adapting.  

Mountain regions in Africa are home to 228 million people, but many more rely on water and food from these areas.  

"Many people in Africa depend on the water and crops provided from these mountain systems – in the mountains but also in the lowlands and cities,” said lead author Aida Cuni-Sanchez. “We must find solutions for these farmers as climate change impacts will only get worse over time.”  

Cuni-Sanchez, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of York (UK), was inspired to study this topic using a participatory approach based on her postdoctoral research at Colorado State University. During that time, Cuni-Sanchez joined the Mountain Sentinels, a network of academics, Indigenous rights holders, mountain communities, and non-governmental organizations focused on mountain sustainability. The Mountain Sentinels network is funded by the National Science Foundation and has members in 56 countries, including 10 African countries.  

The study found similarities in climate changes and impacts across mountain ranges in all eight countries studied – Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania. Farmers reported increased temperatures, reduced fog, changes in rainfall amount and distribution, and an increase in extreme climate events. The most widespread climate-related impacts were lower crop yields and livestock production, increased pests and diseases, reduced human health and water availability, and more soil erosion.  

Farmers adapted by changing planting dates, adopting new crop varieties, increasing use of soil conservation techniques and inputs, like fertilizer and pesticides, and using more veterinary care. Some also were working to diversify their income sources.  

Most adaptation was incremental – farmers made small changes to their normal processes rather than changing livelihoods – and wealthier households were better able to adapt by trying more than one strategy.   

Violent conflicts hindered adaptation in some areas of Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where market access, mobility, and economic opportunities for alternative livelihoods were limited.  

Access to credit, technical skills and markets would help farmers better adapt to climate change, the authors stated, as well as increased knowledge exchange among local communities and external actors. For example, some programs promote climate adaptation by distributing drought-resistant seeds but do not support farmers when they have questions, so the seeds are discarded or abandoned after planting.    

"People are taking actions to adapt the best they can, but they are facing some challenges, often government policies that have negative unintended consequences for mountain people,” Klein said, adding that policies often are made by people living elsewhere who may not understand the local social or cultural context.  

For example, in Rwanda, the government promotes the cultivation of maize and beans but discourages cassava and sorghum, crops perceived by local farmers as being more drought tolerant. 

"In most African mountains, there are no meteorological stations or long-term records of crop yields. Just because changes have not been recorded, it doesn't mean they did not take place,” Cuni-Sanchez said. “We approached farmers’ perceptions and their Indigenous knowledge as living records of past changes, and we show that there have been numerous climatic changes and impacts in all mountains studied. We hope that our approach inspires researchers and practitioners working in other data-deficient regions, as climate change is affecting us all.” 

This approach is a core principle of Mountain Sentinels, which centers the knowledges of local and Indigenous mountain communities and helps to co-create solutions to their challenges.  

"We need to think about every data point as a human being, as a family, trying to provide for themselves and for the next generation,” said Klein, founder of the Mountain Sentinels network. “It's our responsibility to these people to act.”   

The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, and an accompanying policy brief recommend involving community members in co-designing solutions that work for them. The policy brief, by Cuni-Sanchez and the Basque Centre for Climate Change, outlines several priorities for moving forward locally driven and culturally appropriate adaptation strategies in African mountain regions.

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Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-024-02221-w 

Article Title

Perceived climate change impacts and adaptation responses in ten African mountain regions

 

Protection for small-scale producers and the environment?

Researchers investigate certificates promising sustainability for cocoa cultivation in Ghana

University of Göttingen

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Cocoa pods after the harvest

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Credit: David Wagner

Sustainability certificates such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and Cocoa Life promise to improve the livelihoods of small-scale cocoa producers while preserving the biodiversity on their plantations. Together with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, researchers from the University of Göttingen have investigated whether sustainability certificates actually achieve both these goals. To find out, they carried out an analysis within the Ghanaian cocoa production sector. Their results show that although certification improves both cocoa yield and cocoa income for small-scale producers, they were unable to find any effects on biodiversity in the cocoa plantations. The results were published in the journal Ecological Economics.

 

Ghana is the second largest cocoa producer in the world; however, its cocoa sector is associated with many socio-economic and environmental problems. The current study is one of the most comprehensive to date on the effects of sustainability certification: the fieldwork included interviews with 814 cocoa-producers and biodiversity surveys on 119 cocoa plantations, covering 46 villages in five major cocoa-growing regions of the country. The researchers conclude that the implementation of sustainability certification in Ghana is achieving its goal in promoting the economic situation for small-scale producers, but they were unable to find any improvements or negative effect on biodiversity.

 

“The higher yields and associated income from cocoa are a result of the certification requirements, as they motivate small-scale producers to participate in training,” explains first author Marlene Wätzold at Göttingen University’s Research Training Group on Sustainable Food Systems. “Although certified small-scale producers are also encouraged to promote the biodiversity in their plantations, we found no significant environmental effects.”

 

“In our study, we found no evidence of a trade-off between yield and biodiversity,” adds Dr Carolina Ocampo-Ariza at Göttingen University’s Functional Agrobiodiversity and Agroecology Group. “However, it should be borne in mind that biodiversity changes over longer periods of time, meaning that identifying a change can take longer.”

 

The findings of the study suggest that to achieve tangible benefits to nature, the requirements for sustainability certification probably need to be complemented by further biodiversity conservation measures.

 

The research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Research Training Group “Sustainable Food Systems”.

Original publication: Marlene Yu Lilin Wätzold et al. “Do voluntary sustainability standards improve socioeconomic and ecological outcomes? Evidence from Ghana's cocoa sector”. Ecological Economics (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108474

Cocoa beans drying outside before the producers sell them

Credit

Marlene Wätzold

Measurement of biological pest control agents with the help of “dummy” caterpillar to monitor insect bite marks

Credit

David Wagner

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Journal

Ecological Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108474 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Do voluntary sustainability standards improve socioeconomic and ecological outcomes? Evidence from Ghana's cocoa sector

Article Publication Date

3-Feb-2025

 

Researchers solve a fluid mechanics mystery

What began as a demonstration of the complexity of fluid systems became an art piece in the American Physical Society’s Gallery of Fluid Motion, and ultimately its own puzzle that the researchers just solved

University of California - Santa Barbara

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What began as a demonstration of the complexity of fluid systems became an art piece in the American Physical Society’s Gallery of Fluid Motion, and ultimately its own puzzle that the researchers just solved. Their new study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“We came up with this experiment because we were having a hard time convincing people of certain effects happening for the problem of drag reduction,” said assistant
professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose research specialties include modeling flow and investigating drag — as in, the resistive forces that act on solid objects traveling through fluids.

“We had a hypothesis for how this worked,” Luzzatto-Fegiz said. “And this paper actually works out a mathematical model of that phenomenon.”

Of particular interest to the research group, which included UCSB engineering professor Frederic Gibou and collaborators at Princeton University, University of Manchester in the UK, and the Université de Rennes in France, was the ink’s rather uncanny ability to “choose” and move in the correct direction, when intuition would perhaps suggest that the ink would diffuse in a more general manner.

Surface tension — the cohesion that causes molecules on the surface of a fluid to pull together and act like a membrane, resisting exterior forces — plays a large role in this ink-on-milk experiment. The soap — a surfactant, or a substance that reduces surface tension — reduces local tension around the ink, creating motion. However, according to the researchers’ calculations, it’s the presence of surfactants already in the milk that help the ink/soap mixture solve the maze.

“The added surfactant and the preexisting one end up working together,” Luzzatto-Fegiz said. The endogenous surfactant already in the milk creates a landscape of varying resistances that push back on the ink and soap as the mixture moves through the maze, he explained. Dead ends and small spaces push back more strongly, according to the researchers, while the route with the greatest surface area, which also happens to be the one with the exit, offers the path of least resistance.

“That means the added surfactant instantly knows the layout of the maze,” Luzzatto- Fegiz said.

This work complements earlier studies of the forces that drive the movement of the ink/soap. Called the Marangoni effect, it’s what happens when there is a gradient of
surface tension, such as that introduced by the added surfactant, which results in the liquid being pulled from regions of lower surface tension to areas of higher surface
tension. This effect is a “new consequence” that hasn’t been studied yet, and can be relevant in applications and processes that involve “surfactant-driven transport in
complex networks, such as lung airways,” according to the study, and “can inspire improved strategies for drug delivery or fluid transport in complex systems.”

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Journal

Physical Review Letters

TRUMP TYRANNY

HHS external communications pause prevents critical updates on current public health threats

Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America

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The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) is concerned that two weeks have passed since the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health. With the order remaining in effect until a new HHS secretary is confirmed, this unpredictable timeline prolongs uncertainty for both healthcare professionals and the public, and endangers the nation by hindering our ability to detect and respond to public health threats, such as avian influenza (H5N1). Public health officials and healthcare professionals are reliant on continual coordination from local to federal levels to know whether avian influenza is becoming more of a threat to humans, and the local response to this threat has been compromised by this, the longest and most comprehensive communication ban to date. 

This ban has also halted the publication of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a source of timely, evidence-based public health information, and the CDC Health Alert Network (HAN) advisories, which send urgent updates to clinicians and public health officials. Additionally, the pause has disrupted data updates to the CDC website and the release of essential public health data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The inability to access and share timely public health information endangers all Americans. SHEA urges the Administration to lift the HHS communications pause to continue the flow of scientific information. 

About SHEA 

The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) works to advance the science and practice of healthcare epidemiology and infection prevention. Founded in 1980, SHEA promotes education, research, and advocacy to improve patient care and safety. For more information, visit www.shea-online.org.   

Contact: Lindsay MacMurray, lmacmurray@shea-online.org 

 

Montana State scientists publish new research on ancient life found in Yellowstone hot springs

Montana State University

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BOZEMAN – In a new publication in the journal Nature Communications, Montana State University scientists in College of Agriculture highlight fresh knowledge of how ancient microorganisms adapted from a low-oxygen prehistoric environment to the one that exists today. The work builds on more than two decades of scientific research in Yellowstone National Park by MSU professor Bill Inskeep.

The article, titled “Respiratory Processes of Early-evolved Hyperthermophiles in Sulfidic and Low-oxygen Geothermal Microbial Communities” was published Jan. 2. Authors Inskeep, a professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, and Mensur Dlakic, an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, compared the heat-loving organisms in two Yellowstone thermal features, Conch Spring and Octopus Spring, located in the park’s Lower Geyser Basin.

Inskeep and Dlakic selected the locations because they are geochemically similar, with one notable exception: Conch Spring is higher in sulfide and oxygen compared to Octopus Spring. For that reason, they were able to focus on two contrasting thermal environments with both low and high levels of oxygen.

Three types of thermophilic microbes – organisms that thrive in high-temperature environments – were found in both springs, whose temperatures hover around 190 degrees Fahrenheit. The paper states that microbes’ lifestyles in their respective environments can shed light on how life evolved prior to and through the Great Oxidation Event, the period roughly 2.4 billion years ago when Earth’s atmosphere transitioned from having almost no oxygen to the nearly 20% oxygen content it has today.

“When oxygen started to increase in the environment, these thermophiles were likely important in the origin of microbial life,” said Inskeep, who has conducted research in Yellowstone since 1999. “There was an evolution of organisms that utilized oxygen. Octopus has more oxygen and sure enough, there's more aerobic organisms there. These environments have different casts of characters.”

The microorganisms that Inskeep and Dlakic studied are found within “streamers” that live in the rapid stream currents . Streamers, which look like small kelp plants, attach to rocks and other objects within the spring and grow filaments that ‘wiggle’ in the current.

While visually similar, the streamers in Conch and Octopus springs hosted very different collections of microbes. Although three species of microbes were common to both springs, the higher-oxygen Octopus Spring had much greater diversity. That offers insight into how they evolved to thrive in a higher-oxygen world, the scientists said.

The authors compared respiratory genes found in the microbes of Conch versus Octopus Spring. Genes adapted to very low oxygen were “highly expressed, meaning they were more active, in Conch Spring. Conversely, the organisms in Octopus Spring were expressing genes adapted to higher oxygen levels, likely more important as oxygen levels increased throughout the Great Oxidation Event.

In his three decades at MSU, Inskeep has collected extensive data from Yellowstone, but he said there is always more to learn and more questions to ask. In 2020, he and Dlakic received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis program to study Yellowstone’s thermophiles, and their collaboration has continued to illuminate previously unknown aspects of how life on Earth came to be.

MSU’s placement in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem also makes it ideally placed to conduct this type of research, Inskeep said.

“It would be very difficult to reproduce this kind of an experiment in the laboratory; imagine trying to reate hot-water streams with just the right amounts of oxygen and sulfide”, he said. “And that’s what's so nice about studying these environments. We can make these observations in the exact geochemical conditions that these organisms need to thrive.”

And while the machinations of hot spring-dwelling wigglers may feel far removed from human life, they expand our knowledge of how humans came to thrive and how various lifeforms adapt to their surroundings to ensure their survival, Dlakic said.

“It may seem counterintuitive to understand complex life by studying something that's simple, but that's really how it has to start,” he said. “You have to think back to understand where we are today.”

-end-

This story is available on the Web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/24277

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-55079-z 

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Respiratory processes of early-evolved hyperthermophiles in sulfidic and low-oxygen geothermal microbial communities